[em-bee]

Until FLOSS starts doing tit-for-tat (the best game theory decision in these kinds of things), we're going to keep seeeing companies treating FLOSS as their own personal loot-crate with little to no punishment for intentionally doing wrong.

for every company that is doing that there are two others the use FOSS with good intentions, and some of those will make mistakes in their compliance which they will fix when politely approached.

if we start pursuing every violation with an immediate lawsuit then those well intended companies will stop using FOSS because they don't want to risk getting sued.

i will have to stop using FOSS in my products. because my small company can't afford a lawsuit just because i accidentally forgot to give notice or include a link to the source somewhere.

so if we do that FOSS will loose market share.

we can and should pursue malicious users aggressively, but only after we have confirmed that they are not going to comply willingly.

[cycomanic]

> for every company that is doing that there are two others the use FOSS with good intentions, and some of those will make mistakes in their compliance which they will fix when politely approached.

I doubt the statistics here. I surely hope most companies are not this sloppy with their contracts, that they "forget" to follow their requirements.

> if we start pursuing every violation with an immediate lawsuit then those well intended companies will stop using FOSS because they don't want to risk getting sued.

> i will have to stop using FOSS in my products. because my small company can't afford a lawsuit just because i accidentally forgot to give notice or include a link to the source somewhere.

And what will you use instead? How will you follow the requirements of those licences? That's what I never understand in these arguments. The alternatives have typically much stricter requirements and are enforced by large corporations.

> so if we do that FOSS will loose market share.

Why should I care about the market share of FOSS if a significant portion of that share doesn't distribute their code?

> we can and should pursue malicious users aggressively, but only after we have confirmed that they are not going to comply willingly.

[em-bee]

most companies are not this sloppy

i said "some of those will make mistakes", which means, most won't. there is no contradiction.

And what will you use instead?

BSD stuff i suppose, or write my own, or pay for a commercial license which is usually a lot easier to follow than the GPL, because it doesn't require me to give anything to my users. i just pay and then i can use the code however i want as long as i don't resell the source.

Why should I care about the market share of FOSS

that's up to you. i care because FOSS, and the GPL in particular give me and other FOSS users more freedom in how they use the software. in want this freedom to spread. making it risky for businesses to use FOSS is not the way to do that.