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by Wowfunhappy 1914 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.

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.