What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. If combine MIT and GPL, you combine MIT and GPL whether you're using MIT or GPL because, wait for it.. you're combining MIT and GPL. You either can combine these or you cannot. You can use both or you cannot. Which is it? There are many projects that combine MIT and GPL code.

But GPL is the license that rather explicitly forbids combining with some licenses.

EDIT: If you're saying that you cannot combine free with "free" and remain free, then you're right -- you cannot combine MIT with GPL.

And you're right in that a nonfree project can incorporate free code into it. So they have more options, but the end result remains nonfree.

Only code in the public domain or under the WTFPL is categorically freer than the GPL. The MIT and BSD just impose different conditions that you have to follow.

So if I'm going to subject myself to licensing restrictions, it's silly to restrict myself to some code.

So despite having fewer restrictions than the GPL, you think the MIT license is incompatible with at least as many licenses as the GPLs are?

Care to shed some light on your or your lawyer's interpretation of the license? Can you point out what causes incompatibility?

I said nothing about incompatibility with other licenses. I said that by licensing your code under MIT, you're restricted from using L/GPL code, while the opposite is not true, and if you're going to use code that imposes restrictions anyway (like MIT-licensed code), you're better off allowing yourself to use GPL-licensed code as well.

The MIT license does not prohibit using GPL, unless there is a license incompatibility (which I do not see). You can of course prohibit yourself but that has nothing to do with the license. If you release that code, other people can still combine with whatever regardless of what you restrict yourself to.

The GPL on the other hand does prohibit many licenses. Whether you want it or not. Or whether the people who use your code want it or not.

A license that you choose personally never prohibits you from doing anything, because you're the copyright holder, so you don't need a license at all. So choosing the GPL for your doesn't prohibit you from doing anything either. What it does is allow you to use someone else's GPL code, which the MIT doesn't.

Indeed. In fact since the MIT license explicitly grants sublicensing, you can take MIT-licensed software and simply offer it with no modifications under the GPL. This is not safe to do with the BSD license btw.

> If you use BSD, MIT, etc, you can't combine any GPL licensed code.

In the LedgerSMB project, I have started licensing core framework libraries under the BSD license because that should allow easier bridging to proprietary software. We started doing this with PHP libraries, but then decided that Perl shouldn't be a second-class language integration-wise.

There's no reason that GPL code can't depend on BSD code.

These licenses can co-exist and one can choose to license some parts of a project under the GPL and others under a BSD license.