My /bread/ is batch coded and traceable, but the software on your WiFi router probably isn't

The perverse thing is that the same large corporations want software patents, which for independent developers would mean the obligation to track and license the zillions of patents supposedly applying to their work in addition to figuring out which patents are involved in the first place.

Even the more manageable and transparent work of remembering where you got your code from is something the corporations seem unwilling to do themselves, so one might initially think that the burdens of auditing and administering monopoly grants would be a problem for the likes of Sony, but in the event of patent litigation, their defence is just to wave their own patent portfolio at the aggressor or to dip into a damages fund that represents the "cost of doing business" and is deep enough to make most opportunist litigators go away.

Patents also serve as another line of defence for these organisations when caught doing something wrong. If someone accuses them of copyright infringement, their response is to just threaten the accuser with some patent that the legal department can dig up. That's another reason why some corporations don't want you to share your work under certain licences, with the GPL being one of them. It doesn't surprise me that corporations want us to make things easier for them. People should realise that this comes at a cost to us.

Claiming that a reduction in the vendor popularity of copyleft-licensed projects is a bad thing means nothing when the corporations in question would switch to using permissively licensed works and still not share their contributions.