Companies violate patents licenses agreements and all other legal nonsense all the time, that's what they got lawyers for.

Actually, no, it doesn't.

It merely means that the management views GPL violations as a low-probability calculated risk. As in "we know that we can be in compliance, but we won't be wasting any resources on it until it's justified". It has nothing to do with the professionalism.

It sounds like it has everything to do with professionalism.

No, that's a weird attitude (i.e. I'll create a mess today, next person will clean it tomorrow). One has to be responsible for the mess, and actually preventing it to begin with. What you described is exactly the lack of professionalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast

It's only unprofessional if you're bad at it.

I get what you're saying, and I agree absolutely that it is a morally reprehensible thing to lie, cheat, or take the short-term approach to long-term problems. At the same time, you have to realize that anthropomorphizing companies is wrong. They are entities created to obtain profits, and any other reasoning about them is just going to cause you grief and distress. Accept that the system is made to generate non-corporeal profit-seeking amoral sociopaths, and move the fuck on.

No. It's a fake logic often used to excuse of kind of crooked behavior. This doesn't fly. Crooks are crooks, whether they are a company or not. Companies have those who drive them. If those people at the head can't control their own companies not to be crooks - too bad for them, they bear the responsibility.

Which shows stupidity of that management, which thinks that legal violations are acceptable as long as they can view them as "low risk". Or it simply means it's a company of crooks. Either one is not a professional environment.