I think mostly they prefer for people to just fix their delivery to comply with the license, as opposed to causing antagonism towards the community by going straight to a lawsuit. But yes, there are definitely teeth to it if some company for whatever reason doesn't want to fix their infringement.

Violating the (spirit of) the license (without violating the letter, because of loopholes in the license) is exactly what Perens is talking about.

He's not "complaining he isn't getting paid." I think it's pretty rare that the people working on open source software are actually hurting for money or anything. He's complaining that the actual practice of how the software is being used, RHEL and Android on phones and etc, isn't doing well at reflecting the vision of the computing world the GPL was supposed to create. Then, as one possible solution, he's proposing to kill two birds with one stone with a new license where the companies that are skirting the license right now can have to fund the development of particular types of open source software that need to get done anyway but is lacking right now (because of lack of profit motive).

You might or might not agree with his thesis; as much as I think it's interesting and insightful I have some reservations about it. I just thought you were misunderstanding his whole argument as being in terms of money, that's all.

IANAL and I don't have the actual court papers, but is seems to me they were violating GPLv2 Section 6.

Essentially, what this section says is that if you distribute a chunk of software (in this case, the firmware embedded in a smart TV) that in its compiled form contains part or all of a software library covered by this license (in this case, Busybox, which is a bundle of common shell utilities you use every day in a Linux terminal, compacted into one binary to fit onto embedded systems), you have to do one of these four things:

• Package the source code of the GPL'd library with the distribution itself. If your executable contains a version of it modified by you, those modifications must be in the source. In this case this would require putting the raw source code for Busybox on the TV itself in a place the user could access it, or perhaps bundling a flash drive with the source code on it with the TV.

• Include a written offer to send the source to anyone who asks for it, at no cost (except for the cost of transfer itself if applicable, e.g. postage), and honor that offer for at least 3 years. I believe this is what most companies that use GPL'd code do.

• If the distribution happens at a designated place, offer the source at that same place. This is mostly relevant to download pages, not physical products.

• Verify that the customer already has a copy of the source distributed in advance. This is a specific edge case that makes no sense in this context.

This lawsuit was brought about because the sellers of the TVs that contained Busybox were not doing any of the above four things, and those sellers ignored or ghosted plaintiff when plaintiff contacted them about it.

They were selling TVs with GPL-licensed software inside without complying with the terms of the GPL. When challenged, their defense was some version of "But it’s completely free for anyone to use!"

They didn't have to give up every one of their TVs of any model, just the infringing models (the ones that used Busybox without complying with the GPL).

The entire linked article is talking about "open source" in terms of the GPL specifically.