Have you watched Apple's patent war with Samsung? They rely heavily on patents to attack competitors. If they distributed something under the GPLv3, then there'

Have you watched Apple's patent war with Samsung? They rely heavily on patents to attack competitors. If they distributed something under the GPLv3, then there's the chance that Samsung could have looked at that, said "hey, that GPLed package implements something that your patent license covered, that means that we now have a license to that patent." Or there's all of the patents that the license from other parties, like the H.264 patent portfolio. Those patents they can't relicense; so if any of those apply to any of the GPLv3 software they tried to distribute, they would be in violation of one or both of the licenses. Also, the post I responded to is talking about "Apple and other proprietary software publishers." Well, this thread is about Apple, and the one you were responding to was comparing Apple with Microsoft. The part about "other proprietary software vendors" was in there, but I'm not trying to back that up since that's too broad a category to discuss as a whole. There are several different kind of proprietary software vendors, that sell software in many different ways, and so discussing them as a category is likely not to be useful. For example, vendors who sell closed-source, proprietary applications could never use any GPLed code, as linking to it would mean they were required to release the code of the whole application under the GPL. So there there's really no different between GPLv2 and v3. Vendors who sell bundled software hardware combos could ship GPLed software, and embedded Linux is common there. However, some of them like to lock down their hardware, not allowing it to be upgraded or modified by end users. The anti-Tivoization clause specifically forbids that, so they may avoid GPLv3 software in order to avoid the anti-Tivoization clause. One example here is Android, where they even avoid GPLv2, for software that ships on phones, almost everywhere except for the kernel. There are also some proprietary software vendors who do ship GPLv3 software. For example, Oracle, one of the biggest and most notorious proprietary software vendors, actually does ship Oracle Linux, a distro which contains an awful lot of GPLv3 software. So its clear that not every company has made the same decision; some avoid it like the plague (Microsoft and Apple), some avoid it in certain products but not others (Google avoids it Android, but ships GPLv3 code in Chrome OS), and some are fine with shipping it. You can't really make any blanket statements about all proprietary software companies. But anyhow, as I said, for cases such as Apple, it's very obvious that they are fine shipping GPLv2 software, but very clear from their actions that they won't ship GPLv3. There are three major additional restrictions in the GPLv3, and we can speculate which one was the tipping point for Apple. My money is on patents, but I think that the anti-Tivoization may play a role too. However, unless they publicly say something, or someone leaks some internal communication about it, we will just be left speculating as to why.