I&#x27;m no stranger to the GPL. I had a project which spent 9 months arguing with legal in a large institution to support 6 months work involving an independent open source contractor to work on a GPL&#x27;d thing.<p>But it is a restrictive license. Its &quot;plague&quot;-ness comes from its incompatibility with other licenses. Or at least, in the case of ZoL&#x2F;CDDL and Linux&#x2F;GPL, the crippling practical realities of the resulting kernel module binaries that are a derived work trying to impose restrictions on each other. That&#x27;s why you can find precompiled modules on the ZoL website, but never in a distro.<p>That&#x27;s a legitimate criticism, but as you say, also its defining feature.