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.
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.