@rysiek@mastodon.technology @evelyn@misskey.bubbletea.dev I don't think a single case study is sufficient evidence to conclude that it "works", particularly because it's a famous and exceptional one where people *did* actually have the resources to sue.

What matters here is the long tail of projects that don't have those resources, which is what the vast majority of (unrecognized) work in the public commons goes into. The lawsuit approach simply doesn't scale to that.

As for Google: Google will stay away from anything that looks funny at them, they're kind of notorious for it. I'm pretty confident that just putting "we hate Google employees, go away" would have the exact same result.

If you look through their broader licensing/source bans, you'll notice that the theme among them isn't "is copyleft", but "threatens to actually cause us to have to do work or risk assessment of any kind". You don't need licenses or copyright to create that situation. Simply banning them from your community should be more than enough for that.