> Patrick McHardy wasn't interested in GPL compliance and source code release, only in extracting money from non-compliant companies.

So what? If it makes them comply then I'm fine with it. No one else has taken on the fight except for a handful of large companies (Vizio and a settop-box-manufacturer whose name I forgot are the only cases I remember). Everyone else, particularly in the phone and embedded sector, outright shits on the GPL for decades now.

Particularly Google would be in an excellent position - they possess the Android trademark, they could require manufacturers and SoC vendors to properly open-source their stuff as part of the Android license, even for AOSP-powered devices.

Governments could also step in, similarly to enforcement of patents, but no government in the world has done anything to establish legal protection for open source that does not rely on open-source authors filing lawsuits on their own! Just imagine customs going on a trade fair and confiscating every device where the GPL and other OSS licenses are not obliged. After two rounds, no one would dare mess around any longer.

> Got a link for that Apple firmware thing?

Unfortunately not, that was many years ago and I might be remembering it wrong :(

AFAIK Patrick didn't even get compliance at all, just shady tactics to shakedown companies for money. The only way his actions resulted in compliance is if companies were scared after hearing about them and did their own compliance work, but that seems unlikely.

Conservancy are doing the Vizio lawsuit, do a lot of behind-the-scenes work, supported the VMware lawsuit, did a lawsuit against Best Buy/Samsung/Westinghouse/JVC and did one of the earliest compliance actions against Linksys resulting in the OpenWRT project:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/past-lawsuits.... https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/enforcement-st...

Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org did a lot of GPL compliance actions in Germany, admittedly none recently.

It would be great if Google could do GPL compliance actions against Android vendors, but they seem to be moving away from GPL projects instead of embracing them, so that seems very unlikely.

There was already a case where a Linux copyright holder got the USA customs department to withhold import of some GPL violating tablets. I think that eventually resulted in compliance, the details are somewhere on LWN, I forget the URL though.

I think if the Vizio lawsuit is concluded in favor of Conservancy, that is probably the best chance for widespread GPL compliance.

> So what? If it makes them comply then I'm fine with it.

An infringement lawsuit can't make anyone comply because a court will only ever order an infringer to pay monetary damages. An infringer might settle a lawsuit by agreeing to comply with GPL terms instead of paying damages, but that's not something a court would order.

Theoretically, if the GPL were a contract (an exchange of promises) and not a license (a grant subject to conditions), then a court could order a party in breach to comply with its terms. A court would only do that, however, if monetary damages were insufficient to compensate the non-breaching party.

Courts can also deliver injunctions, "specific performance" and similar non-financial remedies, not just monetary remedies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_remedy

The Conservancy lawsuit against Vizio contends that the GPL is also a contract and that downstream users are third-party beneficiaries of that contract, so they should be able to sue for compliance with the contract. Its a really interesting approach and I hope they win. I encourage you to read the court documents, they make for interesting reading.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

Also, monetary damages are pretty much always insufficient in GPL cases, since money doesn't get you source code. I guess if the money was enough to pay for reverse engineering and reimplementation of the fixes/features present in the non-compliant codebase, then they could be enough.

> I guess if the money was enough to pay for reverse engineering and reimplementation of the fixes/features present...

Exactly.