Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering (Opensource.com)

That in the commercial world he'd have signed his copyrights away, and there'd be an executive is irrelevant. In the commercial world the code would also (far more likely than not) have been kept proprietary, and never have turned into a mass+distributed developed kernel.

If everything from the commercial world is good and the final word, then just give up on copyleft altogether. Yet, despite the dislike of copyleft of many of the exec types, they're nearly all using Linux.