Discussion
For people who still believe the GPL and copyleft is useless, everybody does what they want anyway and corporations have already won:
I'm working at a pretty big corporation. Our products are entirely proprietary. Nobody will ever know what's running on them.
Copyleft code is still handled extremely strictly. With mandatory legal reviews for every package we want to add. And formal reprimands for everyone trying to slip one by legal.
Of course the most unethical corps don't care.
@david_chisnall Sure, but how do you get around that high compliance burden, while keeping licensing? As you propose in your original post, being afraid of the community backlash is a good substitute. But it's also something that comes with compliance costs. And possible higher ones, because my guess at least would be that figuring out a community's reaction to some use of the project is going to be a lot more difficult than figuring out the legalese of the GPL and copyright law.
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@mmeier
And that's exactly the problem. Companies that actively wish to follow the rules have a big compliance burden that makes them less competitive. Companies that are happy to behave unethically can get away with it with zero consequences.
So the incentives are biased in favour of unethical companies. And companies are machines that optimise for whatever the current set of incentives favours.
EDIT: The problem is not that the GPL can't be enforced. The problem is that the GPL has a set of stated goals and it ends up acting in direct contradiction to those.
The goal of the GPL is to promote Free Software. If you want to promote Free Software then you want to create a set of circumstances where releasing Free Software is incentivised relative to releasing non-Free Software. You want to create a set of circumstances where customers demand Free Software. You want to create a set of circumstances where creating Free Software is cheaper than creating non-Free Software.
That's the set of success criteria against which I measure the GPL and it routinely fails against all of them.