BSA is a fucking joke. A couple of decades ago I -- or rather the one-man legal entity that stood firewall between me and the corporate world -- received a Letter Of Demand from BSA "requiring" a full inventory of all software in use by my "organisation". For the record it was Microsoft behind this campaign. Since I had by then already switched 100% to Linux and FOSS I had no qualms about simply ignoring there peremptory bullshit. A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from them threatening legal action and jackboots kicking down my door. I believe my response was "fuck off", with no accompanying elucidation. Never heard from them again. So much for the BSA. Rather surprised to learn they even still exist.
Indeed it happens, but my question was more given your initial post, do you think it's a good way to manage licensing?
To me it provokes an adversarial relationship between software vendors and their customers and is quite likely a factor in the rise of the use of Open Source software in enterprise.
If the propietary software industry is to continue to prosper, it seems likely that annoying their customers with this approach to licensing is not a good one.
Now you could argue that this will have a knock on effect on Open source as many devs are employed by software companies, but that won't necessarily stop it happening.
Ah well if we're arguing that kind of point, I'd say that in my line of work (Security tester) I'm seeing faaar more open source software than I did 10-15 years ago even in traditionally enterprise software friendly environments (e.g. banks/public sector)
The demise of proprietary unix in favour of Linux is one striking example.
another is the rise of open source products like Docker and Kubernetes. They are being heavily deployed in organizations that might once have considered more proprietary software options instead.
I'm not sure I'd agree that GPL compatible licenses have failed.
To take one example Kubernetes, one of the most popular projects around at the moment is Apache 2 licensed which has been agreed with the FSF is an open source license. Other popular projects like Tensorflow also use this license
Likewise very popular projects like Visual Studio code, React Native and Angular make use of the MIT license which is also GPL compatible.
None of those licenses are copyleft, a company can pick any of those projects listed by you, sell a closed source product with their improvements, without giving even a semicolon back to upstream.
I see the opposite with languages and runtimes these days. If anything, I'd say there's a failure of trying to make money on the language/runtime itself instead of thinking or other parts of the company.
That's totally fine with me and the beauty of restrictionless freedoms, you can do what you want. I license lots of my work that way, keep other parts hidden, etc. It's a healthy model instead of this rampant litigious approach often coupled with an irrational fear of theft. To be truly open sans restrictions is to take the bad with the good and recognize that what you open is not specifically where you make your money. Happily the industry continues to move towards unencumbered software especially on the language/runtime front.
That was my point about failure of pure open source, the money needs to come from somewhere and the ideals of GPL don't work across all business domains.
Oracle contributes about 90% of development (80% of the issues, and almost all new JEPs). Red Hat contributes ~5%, and IBM only 1%. So the recent Red Hat acquisition improves their position a lot, but before that Oracle and IBM paid for the majority of OpenJDK salaries the same way Bill Gates and I combined have billions of dollars.
Then again, there are plenty of other JVMs available since the 2000's, and many customers do pay for them.