It just drives more companies to be more careful about their license. My company has for years banned any GPL3 code on devices we ship. If GPL2 is suddenly found more restrictive than we expected we will ban that too. FreeBSD/NetBSD will be the winner there, along with other projects. We don't contribute much, but we already consider license before we contribute back - and if we can't get GPL code we will make the changes needed to BSD code. Most of our changes will be contributed back - only changes that are actually things that matter to us will be withheld and those are not part of open source projects to anyway)
The point of copyleft licenses is to make it hard to make proprietary software and easy to make free software. It sounds like they're working as intended.
My understanding is that this suit is partly on the grounds of Visio not releasing modifications to copylefted code. The MPL and LGPL have the same requirements; is not being able to use LGPL, GPL, AGPL, MPL, or CeCILL-licensed software really harder than compliance?
Stories like this just make me all the more convinced that the right approach is to make software a commoditized complement of a service; software is not as scarce a resource as labor.
Like I said, companies are free to use a more sustainable model that doesn't require artificial scarcity: they can provide services to reflect the fact that copies of software are not a scarce resource, while labor is.
It's not our duty to keep old business models alive. We shouldn't try to appease companies so they do what we like; they're the ones who should adapt to our needs.
