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But Google would make less money (and incur more costs) if they went after companies not in compliance with the GPL. I do agree Google could come up with a way

• azakai 15y ago
  > But Google would make less money (and incur more costs) if they went after companies not in compliance with the GPL. Who is "they" here? Google? Or other copyright holders on the GPL'd code? Regardless, I don't see how this matters. If anyone went after these companies, after some hassle they would comply with the GPL. And that's it. I am a long-time open source supporter, and it annoys me when people don't comply with the FOSS licenses to the code they ship. But, let's be honest - in most cases in the current context, the companies have no code that would be useful to the community, so we would gain basically nothing if they did comply, and they do not comply out of either a misunderstanding of the GPL or laziness. So it really doesn't matter. It could be argued though that out of the principle of the thing, they should be forced to comply, so there isn't a culture of ignoring open source licenses. I'd agree to that, but it doesn't matter if I do, someone with copyrights to the relevant code + time + money needs to agree and actually sue them.