My understanding is that any amount above costs is pretty limited - it's also far less than commercial licensing of the code would have cost. The companies who

My understanding is that any amount above costs is pretty limited - it's also far less than commercial licensing of the code would have cost. The companies who habitually violate the GPL contribute approximately nothing back to the wider ecosystem. The best you can say is that they gain brand awareness for Linux, but that's it. People release code under copyleft licenses because they want people to provide source to their downstream recipients. If they were more interested in brand awareness than source, they'd have used a liberal BSD-style license instead. Having vendors refuse to use GPLed code because they don't want to ship source is arguably a perfectly reasonable outcome.