[swiftcoder]

> knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance

Everyone thinks this until they become the next Linksys, and have to crack open their entire tech stack because someone reverse engineered the text of the GPL in their firmware...

[KronisLV]

Frankly, i doubt that most software projects out there get that sort of attention. Aside from that, it's also very likely that management and the legal departments of most orgs don't even inspect the licenses of all the libraries that closely.

Not saying that i condone it or anything like that. However, it does feel like these things will oftentimes be ignored because of a lack of a regulatory body that'd inspect all codebases for compliance (even the idea of which doesn't feel feasible).

Because of that, cases where someone has both the skills to decompile a codebase and also has an axe to grind seem like the exception, rather than the norm.

[swiftcoder]

In the linksys case no decompiling was even necessary. The plain text of the GPL license was present in the firmware image. Grep is a great tool for this sort of thing that everyone has access to :)