Toward a "modern" Emacs

As the grand parent wrote, the notion of a bad actor very subjective. For a consumer of the device who saved some money because that actor passed some of the savings from not complying to GPL to the consumer that actor is good.

And again, the license alone just sets an upper bounds on efforts to comply. The real required efforts depends on copyright holders. And in case of Linux those effectively decided that it is better to have Linux on more devices even if the collateral is that in a lot cases the device manufactures do not follow GPL.