Well, maybe. Until the likes of Oracle come along and sue the shit out of your nice little startup for a few lines of wrongly-attributed boilerplate.

Licenses aren't enforced by most hippie coders due to lack of interest and money. But they sometimes are enforced by greedy big corporations without an interest in anything but lots of money.

Conservancy enforce licenses in a principled way. They are currently working on an enforcement action in the IoT space:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

Yes, and it is nice that they are doing it. But they are limited by their manpower and financials. And they are not agressive enough imho, e.g. by avoiding litigation and extending courtesies like voluntary GPL2 extensions after termination for offenders. They should engage more in shock and awe. Compliance departments all over the industry should fear them, not laugh about them.

Agreed that they are limited, hopefully the grant they got for enforcement actions will improve that. They don't avoid litigation where necessary, for example their action against Linksys over the WRT54G router resulted in the creation of the OpenWRT project. They are planning more litigation in the IoT space using the grant money.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

Personally I think the principles they operate under (including extending GPLv3 termination to GPLv2) are fairly reasonable, I don't think unintentional/short-term violations should be punished harshly. I definitely agree that companies that refuse to come into compliance need more incentives to change their behaviour.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...