First of all, it has been litigated several times, at least in Germany. I'm on my phone, so here is only one example I quickly found by Googling: http://www.t

First of all, it has been litigated several times, at least in Germany. I'm on my phone, so here is only one example I quickly found by Googling: http://www.timelex.eu/en/blog/detail/gpl-license-reaffirmed-by-german-court http://www.timelex.eu/en/blog/detail/gpl-license-reaffirmed-... Second, most businesses already avoid the GPL, but among those that can't, such as Android device makers - well, some of them seem to be fine with avoiding the edge cases by just publishing the source to their kernel modules. Considering this, I suspect that for the other half, it would not be the end of the world to have to reveal some minor secrets about the hardware or whatever; they just neglect to publish source because they are unlikely to be penalized any significant amount for doing so. Of course, there is the risk of GPL making it into codebases by accident, but really only if you spend zero effort keeping track of it. There are companies like Black Duck that provide tools to scan a codebase for known open source code, and honestly a quick grep should often be sufficient as well. In VMware's case, I'm not sure about the executable loading or kernel module issues, but if "vmkernel" itself has code copied and pasted from Linux, as is alleged - well, they should have known better! No need for the largest software effort since Y2K when you could just ensure someone in the company understands the GPL and how it relates to the company's code, before said code is highly developed.