And for good reason!

Linus and Greg KH's reasoning for avoiding lawsuits: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

The principles used by FSF/Conservancy operate their copyleft compliance efforts under are eminently reasonable and make it clear that lawsuits are a last resort that are only used when the violator is being unreasonable and blatantly violating the licenses.

https://www.fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Yes it's incredibly difficult for someone to understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it. It's important to note that Linux would likely not exist if PC makers had used the same lockdown methods as used today.

Moreover when GKH and Linus talk about how GPL enforcement has done nothing good, they conveniently leave out the success of WRT enforcement, which caused one of the biggest Linux offshoots, largely based on volunteer work.

Finally, the audacity of saying "let's talk about legal things without lawyers present" is such a typical software engineer thing, just imagine the reaction someone was proposing to talk about kernel programming without any kernel programmers present

BSD as in the software distribution almost didn't get to exist thanks to a lawsuit, but once that was cleared it was out. It Linux didn't exist, it would have taken over the niche.

Linux itself is not that special - it mostly is a case of right place and right time.