this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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You can't remove the license, say MIT, or add any restrictions to the code. You can combine it with other works and distribute the combined work under different terms, provided you still abide by the terms of the license (e.g. source distributions need to retain the license, binary distributions don't).
Copyleft forces modified distributions to have the same terms as the copylefted software. If you have some MIT code and some GPL code and you combine it, the combined work is GPL. Likewise if you combine proprietary code and GPL, the combined work is GPL, and that'd regardless of how it's distributed.
Permissive licenses protect the source as it was when it was combined into the other work. Copyleft licenses enforce distributed changes to the source are made available under the same license. Which one you want depends on what "freedoms" you want. Do you want the freedom to use the source however you want, including with proprietary code? Then you want a permissive license. Do you want to ensure that any changes to the code are always available? Then you want copyleft code.
With the minimal amount of work added the combined work can now have added restrictions. They're pushover licenses.
Devs are free to choose whatever license they want but in the pathfinding problem of interacting with others then "protecting the source" is the wrong target node. Copyleft is a tool to help people.