we stand to lose not only Cisco as an ally, but any corporation that estimates (rightly or wrongly) that their own potential exposure to an SFLC lawsuit might b

we stand to lose not only Cisco as an ally, but any corporation that estimates (rightly or wrongly) that their own potential exposure to an SFLC lawsuit might be greater than their potential efficiency gains from open-sourcing. Why should that matter if we live in universe B and their estimates are therefore wrong? The open source community, being more efficient, would just build an alternative product that works better. OTOH, if we did not have the GPL or refused to enforce it, nothing would deter an unscrupulous company from stealing open source code and not contributing their own improvements to it to the community. Any improvements to the software from the open source community would quickly be incorporated into the proprietary version, while any improvements made by the hypothetical unscrupulous company would remain proprietary. Once a few of these companies started enjoying success, every other profit-maximizing company would be forced by the market to follow suit or perish, and we'd eventually have a clusterfuck of companies stealing open source code while the open source community dwindled to nothing because their products could never possibly compete with the proprietary alternatives. I think we live in universe C, where, without an enforceable GPL, the most efficient method of software production would be to take what you can (from the open source community), and give nothing back. YARR!