License and Dependency Profile of 54 Popular npm Packages (2026)

Open, reproducible dataset recording the declared license, latest version and direct-dependency count of 54 widely-used npm packages. Finding: MIT dominates (85%), Apache-2.0 second (9%); permissive licensing is the near-universal default, with 7.1 direct dependencies on average. Queried from the public npm registry, fully reproducible with curl (script included). First-hand verifiable open-source research maintained alongside the versioning and developer guides at VersionDude. Collected 2026-07-24.