Examples
Suppose a software package has a license that says, "modified versions must mention the developers in any advertising materials," and another package's license says "modified versions cannot contain additional attribution requirements." Without direct permission from the copyright holder(s) for at least one of the two packages, it would be impossible to legally distribute a combination of the two because these specific license requirements cannot be simultaneously fulfilled. Thus, these two packages would be license-incompatible.
Not even open-source licenses are necessarily compatible, which can make it legally impossible to mix (or link) even open-source code if the components are released under different licenses. For example, software that combined code released under version 1.1 of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) could not be distributed without violating one of the licenses' terms by default. This is despite both licenses being approved by the Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation.
Read more about this topic: License Compatibility
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