For people who still believe the GPL influences corporations in a meaningful way:
When I was at Microsoft, I worked on a product that used Linux. The product was cancelled for largely unrelated reasons before it shipped, so the exact details are irrelevant but anything that links Linux needs to loop in lawyers, so I spent a lot of time talking to them.
Maybe 10% of the total time was spent with the technicalities of the GPL. The fact that the GPL is ambiguous and poorly written and the Linux syscall exemption is even worse made me expect long discussions about the legalese. But instead the conclusion of the GPL-focused discussions was basically:
No one really knows what the GPL can actually enforce and half of the stuff that's done with Linux is technically in violation. Microsoft ships Linux images for Azure that come with a click-through license that prohibits running them on any other cloud and no one cares. We can make a convincing argument that this is okay. Only a handful of companies can afford a protracted legal battle with Microsoft and none of them are sufficiently motivated to take us to court over this, so it's unlikely to come up.
The remaining 90% of the discussions were around how the product would be perceived by Linux maintainers, the wider Linux community, and the broader F/OSS ecosystem. Microsoft had put a lot of effort into the 'Microsoft <3 Linux' marketing things. The Ballmer-era alienation of the most active developer communities had cost the company a lot of ecosystem market share. The risk of pushing developers away from Microsoft products and platforms was something that the lawyers regarded as a huge risk. If two of the senior Linux maintainers had said 'we think this is not an acceptable use of Linux' then that would have torpedoed the project instantly.
The moral of this story is that, if positive engagement with your community is perceived as valuable, you have an enormous amount of leverage over big companies. At the time, Microsoft was (by market cap) the largest company in the world. The legal text, in contrast, isn't worth the paper it's written on when your adversary can afford to outspend you in court by six orders of magnitude. When they happen to be aligned, the legal text may look as if it's working, but that's a coincidence.
