I mean, it's much less trivial than other licenses. Let's look at the scenarios here:
- John Dev takes a bit of MIT/BSD licensed code. He drops an acknowledgment in the About screen (which nobody will ever read), and that's it. (yes, many still fail to do it...)
- Jane Dev takes a bit of (L)GPL licensed code. She has to add the license file to the installer, so the installer people start asking questions: "is this an eula? Should we display it on install?" Jane clarifies that we just need to ship it, but now Legal is in the loop. Legal goes "it says here that we have to provide stuff on request, does that mean all our private code?" Jane explains how she carefully used it in such a way to avoid that scenario; half of the explanation goes above the head of every lawyer in the room, so some of them trust her and some don't. Let's assume it gets greenlit, now we have to talk to the website folks to put a link somewhere - but Legal are still on the case: "ah, but we don't want to make it too easy, let's just have an email." Who's going to monitor that mailbox? Can you do it, Jane? Legal goes "no, Jane is technically not responsible for distributing, let's loop back in the release managers". Release managers don't want to hear it, they already have enough shit to shovel. By now half the people have gone on holiday one or more times, there are more urgent fires to put out, and the thread is forgotten. Product ships. Jane moves on to found her own startup. The product will likely be infringing for years, which may or may not ever be detected.
I love the GPL and I wish everyone used it and respected it, but it's not easy to live with it.
It's "less trivial" compared to the MIT license, sure. But compare the GPL to any proprietary license, such as the ones Lego probably slaps on their own software, and suddenly the GPL is fairly simple, relatively…
Some proprietary licenses are complicated, like oracle and vmware. But most of them you just pay and you're set. Even with those two it's still sort of like that. But even then they will just threat to audit and you could pay them off there as well.
No, they're not? "pay and you're set" to do what is the question, then.
IANAL. Let's take VSCode as an example. At the very least, the license:
1. permits data collection on your machine.
2. restricts the user: no reverse engineering, no disassembly, no decompile. No alteration of any "notices" from MS (or others). No distribution (…ish, there are some exceptions? it's complicated?).
3. a $5 limit on damages, which is … interesting.
And to be fair to MS, I think this is one of the shorter and clearer proprietary licenses that I've found. But it is hardly "pay and you're set". (Hell, "pay" — the price is free^W your data, here.)
But a further part of the complication is the mere distinction of proprietary-ness of the license. The GPL is the GPL, and once I've read it, and made a decision on the terms of it, a piece of software can signal its license with "GPLv2" or such, and I can essentially get a cache-hit on my legal interpretation of the license. Every proprietary license is a cache-miss, and is thus immensely more time consuming to process.
This is true of almost all contracts. If respecting terms was easy, we'd have no needs for lawyers and courts.