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In the time leading up to the next Kernel Summit topics are presented and discussed beforehand on the Ksummit-discuss mailing list. There [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues was introduced. Even though Linus is not subscribed to this list he speaks his mind, bluntly. A good read.
I'm not aware of anybody but the lawyers and crazy people that were happy about how the BusyBox situation ended up. Please pipe up if you actually know differently. All it resulted in was a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Botht he original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.
So I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working title.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:53PM
On the other hand, leaving them alone won't teach them the proper way of doing things with GPL code. This means just because you didn't want to "poison the well" with some small time project that was breaking the rules, they'll continue breaking the rules over and over as time goes on, with larger and larger projects. Eventually you'll have to either tell them to play right (poison the well) or just admit the fact that you've unofficially thrown it into the public domain. And at some point these companies you want to protect for breaking the law will get a new set of balls and take to the courtroom themselves under the assumption that the GPLed code is actually their proprietary code. And then the falling out is 100x worse.
Far better to make sure they're playing properly from the start. If they don't like having the ability to hide changes to the GPLed code they're using then they should write their own code or use open source code that actually allows them to tell the community doing the bulk of the work for them to piss off.