It's occasionally explained—but still not widely understood, I'd wager—that this is the reason why so much GNU code is hard to follow. In the US legal system t

It's occasionally explained—but still not widely understood, I'd wager—that this is the reason why so much GNU code is hard to follow. In the US legal system the merger doctrine is a concept whereby a given expression cannot be granted protection if it's not sufficiently creative—and there only so many ways to express something when stripped down to its fundamentals. In response to this, RMS and Moglen encouraged contributors from very early on to try to express the inner workings of GNU utilities in creative and non-obvious ways out of caution against the possibility that the copyleft obligations of the GPL wrt a given package could be nullified by a finding in court that it did not pass the threshold for creativity.