[Wowfunhappy]

I don’t think this situation is inherently different from buying a proprietary library, and discovering that the vendor stole code from the Windows kernel. Or a musician buying a sample, and discovering it was copied from a Disney movie.

You’re responsible for the stuff you use. You should audit it as well as you can—but realize that crap always happens.

[Jiro]

It's a lot less likely that Windows kernel code or Disney music is going to be included by mistake, so your potential exposure is much less. In the case of the Windows kernel, it's a lot less likely that anyone is even going to have it because even the leaks of Windows code are distributed to orders of magnitude fewer people than GPL code.

[Wowfunhappy]

The Windows kernel was a random example and probably nit the best one. I don’t think it’s so crazy to think an employee at a vendor would copy paste some code they wrote for a previous vendor.

[Jiro]

My point generalizes, though.

As a rule, proprietary code isn't distributed widely, so there are few opportunities to include it, and as a rule, the harsher restrictions on distributing it make people less likely to not notice that they're not supposed to distribute it. It's much more likely that incompatibly licensed GPL code would be widely distributed and that it would be included by mistake.

Sure, you described a scenario where this can happen to proprietary code. It's not impossible, just less likely.

[Wowfunhappy]

That’s fair. I guess I just don’t see this is a failing of the GPL. If I want to share some code so others can read it (for education/interest/research/whatever) I should be able to do so—while reserving all rights to reuse the code if I so choose.