If your principles are such that you won’t buy a product due to a realistically immaterial instance of a GPL violation, sure. Given the number of GPL violations in the wild I refuse to believe that anyone but the most Stallman-esque among us are living to this standard.
It's not immaterial, it's literally the point of the GPL. If they don't want to release their modifications they shouldn't take advantage of the huge effort that went into the linux kernel. Maybe use a different OS and license it..
Fair enough. Everybody can try to create their own community with their own rules. You seem to have decided that you prefer a community that doesn't adhere to licensing agreements. Don't be surprised if other communities exclude you.
I can understand not being ideologically aligned with Stallman and Co.
I also agree that there must be lots of violations of the GPL out there. Software is often invisible.
That said, I don’t think there’s many big companies out there openly doing it. If get caught, they comply with the minimum effort possible, but they comply. I don’t see them being blatant or cavalier about it.
Two main reasons for me to avoid them:
1. The attitude makes them untrustworthy. If they are blatantly violating this, what else are they willing to ignore? They have obligations towards me as a consumer, for example. Will they respect those? Will they sale my data to others?
2. There’s no guarantee that they will continue being able to operate in my country. A judge could theoretically force them to close shop. So I’d rather not put my data on their product.
Imagine if we treated copyright material like this.
"You bought tickets to Avatar 2? Given the number of pirated copies online, I refuse to believe that anyone but the idiots among us are willing to pay for content."
