Really? If you find a piece of proprietary software does basically the same thing as yours, and the binaries contains the same strings/artwork, then it's reasonable to make a legal case of it. You can even contact FSF and they'll take it further.
A lot of open source stuff is libraries and utilities though that is pretty entrenched in the code. It is hard to even find out about a violation, let alone prove anything.
Imagine I came up with a new algorithm to do Fourier Transforms 10% faster than FFTW (or whatever the current market leader is) and make a library and I release it as GPL. A company could fairly easily just import it to whatever project they’re doing, and it would be extremely difficult for me to prove anything, especially if I don’t have any obvious things like strings in there.
That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.
If you're doing something algorithmically different and unique, presumably that would show up in the assembly.
> That’s not even taking into account that it would be relatively easy for a corporation to just pay a junior engineer to do a direct “port” of the library to another language and pretending it’s their own independent work.
Important to keep in mind that copyright is not patents. If they are just stealing the "idea" of your algorithmic improvement, that probably isn't even a GPL violation. (This isn't fully right as they would probably have to use a clean-room design to avoid copyright infringement. My point is more that such a situation is pretty muddy and might actually be allowed)
I don’t think it is realistic to expect a developer to load every executable that might use their software into Ghidra or something and try and find a smoking gun about how their code might be used, and then hire an attorney to put together a case on that. In the case of my example, Fourier transforms are used everywhere in a wide variety of applications, and if my implementation is only like 10% faster it wouldn’t be very clear to an outside observer.
> Important to keep in mind that copyright is not patents. If they are just stealing the "idea" of your algorithmic improvement, that probably isn't even a GPL violation.
I am not saying it’s legal or not, I have no idea, just that that is why I have become disillusioned with the idea of open source, and I am not convinced that a well-meaning license like GPL is a realistic safeguard against corporate exploitation.