is anyone aware of any company, anywhere, ever suffering any repercussions for violating the GPL? The most I can see is the Busybox lawsuits, which resulted in meaninglessly-small penalty payments, and the FSF vs Cisco case, which also resulted in nothing that even slowed Cisco down.
I guess what I'm wondering is: what is the actual reason not to just ignore the GPL until you get caught, then pay paltry sums to various nerd bureaucracies and keep truckin'
I guess what I'm wondering is: what is the actual reason not to just ignore the GPL until you get caught, then pay paltry sums to various nerd bureaucracies and keep truckin'
Follow
דגל שכור 🏴 
@khm this is a question for the software freedom conservancy. Their site might give you some relevant stories.
Copyleft is just as hard to enforce as copyright, generally, unless you can afford a legal team willing to challenge larger legal teams. Varies by your locality, but you're right to think code theft is the norm. Big legal departments just play cleanup for software engineering teams that are simply told to meet a deadline at whatever cost. This is true regardless of licensing, or how the code was shared.
