> Is it really that common for companies to violate the GPL today?
Every company I've worked at is careful about GPL. Some are more careful than others, but they all put at least some effort into ensuring nobody brings in GPL libraries.
As a lawyer explained to me, they understand at some point GPL code will be shipped - it is too tempting. The real goal is to ensure that when it happens they can convince the courts it is a rouge employee doing something he wasn't supposed to, as then the penalty is a slap on the wrist and a bunch of developers emergency switched to rid our stuff of GPL. If the courts decide the company didn't do enough to prevent infringement then the court will decide that it was company policy to make their product open source and the courts will force the release of source code. This is why all developers I work with have to take open source training, we have someone assigned to audit all our code, and we have bought tools that look for potential open source code, it all builds a case before the court. To my knowledge the above as kept us from infringing in the first place, which is the real goal, but since all tools have holes eventually we can assume it won't.
Every company I've worked at is careful about GPL. Some are more careful than others, but they all put at least some effort into ensuring nobody brings in GPL libraries.
As a lawyer explained to me, they understand at some point GPL code will be shipped - it is too tempting. The real goal is to ensure that when it happens they can convince the courts it is a rouge employee doing something he wasn't supposed to, as then the penalty is a slap on the wrist and a bunch of developers emergency switched to rid our stuff of GPL. If the courts decide the company didn't do enough to prevent infringement then the court will decide that it was company policy to make their product open source and the courts will force the release of source code. This is why all developers I work with have to take open source training, we have someone assigned to audit all our code, and we have bought tools that look for potential open source code, it all builds a case before the court. To my knowledge the above as kept us from infringing in the first place, which is the real goal, but since all tools have holes eventually we can assume it won't.