@mmeier@social.mei-home.net And that's exactly the problem. Companies that actively wish to follow the rules have a big compliance burden that makes them less competitive. Companies that are happy to behave unethically can get away with it with zero consequences. So the incentives are biased in favour of unethical companies. And companies are machines that optimise for whatever the current set of incentives favours. EDIT: The problem is not that the GPL can't be enforced. The problem is that the GPL has a set of stated goals and it ends up acting in direct contradiction to those. The goal of the GPL is to promote Free Software. If you want to promote Free Software then you want to create a set of circumstances where releasing Free Software is incentivised relative to releasing non-Free Software. You want to create a set of circumstances where customers demand Free Software. You want to create a set of circumstances where creating Free Software is cheaper than creating non-Free Software. That's the set of success criteria against which I measure the GPL and it routinely fails against all of them.