Linux.com

The thing that makes the GPL not a reasonable license is that it applies its own terms to all parts of a program, even those owned by other people. That is, if any component of a program that is linked together in a way that can be called a 'derived work' is covered by the GPL, then all components must be, or the program cannot be distributed under any terms. This is true even if the users consider the license terms of the other components to be acceptable and it takes away their freedom to choose such a combination. The Samba team has explicitly refused to build a plug-in architecture that could separate functionality into programs not bound to the same license. For example, such a change could have allowed netatalk to cooperate with samba's file locking scheme and avoid corruption for many people. Without such a mechanism, all Microsoft must do to stop the distribution of samba is to find an operation that they have patented, or introduce a necessary one in a future version of their file sharing. Since that part could not continue to be distributed under GPL terms, the program could not be distributed at all.

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