>There's absolutely no reason to expect companies to comply with the GPL, other than good manners and good ethics
Nonsense, they are legally bound by the licence to provide source code when distributing binaries should the recipient request it. Obviously there are violators counting on not being taken to court but they are still violators and are running the risk of being being sued.
Let's say that Oracle would stop releasing the source code to the enhancements they make on Linux for their distribution, do you think Red Hat, IBM and other large contributors would just let Oracle use their enhancements while violating the GPL by not releasing their own? Hardly, they would take them to court.
GPL works well for this kind of cooperative project where lots of different players pool their resources as everyone is legally bound to release their enhancements. This obviously doesn't mean that every licence violation will be brought to justice, but the important thing is that they are in their right to so should they find it necessary.
However the fully open source development of Linux doesn't fit all projects, looking at FreeBSD it seems it's mainly being used by companies who wants to incorporate it into proprietary solutions where they make changes to the kernel/system which are used as a competitive edge and thus don't want to open source those.
Again, there is no 'one size fits all' solution and as such it's a good thing there's choice.
Nonsense, they are legally bound by the licence to provide source code when distributing binaries should the recipient request it. Obviously there are violators counting on not being taken to court but they are still violators and are running the risk of being being sued.
Let's say that Oracle would stop releasing the source code to the enhancements they make on Linux for their distribution, do you think Red Hat, IBM and other large contributors would just let Oracle use their enhancements while violating the GPL by not releasing their own? Hardly, they would take them to court.
GPL works well for this kind of cooperative project where lots of different players pool their resources as everyone is legally bound to release their enhancements. This obviously doesn't mean that every licence violation will be brought to justice, but the important thing is that they are in their right to so should they find it necessary.
However the fully open source development of Linux doesn't fit all projects, looking at FreeBSD it seems it's mainly being used by companies who wants to incorporate it into proprietary solutions where they make changes to the kernel/system which are used as a competitive edge and thus don't want to open source those.
Again, there is no 'one size fits all' solution and as such it's a good thing there's choice.