Downsides of copyleft

As well as being not invulnerable and somewhat unnecessary, copyleft licenses may also be at least a little bit harmful to the software they are protected by, at least compared to permissive licenses.

The trouble with Free Software licenses (especially restrictive ones) is that they have a tendency to be incompatible with other licenses (even other Free Software licenses). Consider the sad case of the GCC manuals which underwent discussion on the GCC developers mailing list a while back. GCC is licensed under the GPLv3, whilst the documentation is licensed under the GFDL. Both of these are Free Software licenses, but because they contain slightly different restrictions, they are mutually incompatible - you can't take GCC source code and copy it into the GCC manual, nor can you take parts of the GCC manual and copy them into the source code. This means that the technique of literate programming is impossible - documentation can't be automatically generated from the code.

This could be solved if there was one single copyleft license that was used for everything, but I can't see that happening if the GNU project can't even standardize on a single license for its own projects.

It's important to note that these problems are caused by the restrictions imposed by the license, not the freedoms it guarantees - the same problems would occur with proprietary software, if the corresponding situation ever occurred.

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