&gt; It&#x27;s &quot;you can&#x27;t provide binaries without also providing source code&quot;, not &quot;you can&#x27;t do binaries&quot;.<p>Edit: It&#x27;s &quot;without also providing source code <i>under the terms of the GPL</i> &quot; - this is a nuance of the GPL&#x27;s attempt at re-defining a term of art - &quot;derived work&quot;. And yes, it deviates from Copyright law norms. Whether a court will consider only the meaning as understood traditionally, or whether they will simply treat the confusingly implied broader definition as a mere additional term of the license which must be enforced, I have no idea.<p>&gt; Would you prefer them to spend their resources chasing down the violations where the offender provides no source code, or the violations that can be sidestepped by typing &#x27;make&#x27; into a terminal?<p>Who says they&#x27;re expending resources on Canonical? They&#x27;ve left NVidia alone, because they don&#x27;t ship GPL&#x27;d software. They&#x27;re spending on VMWare, because they ship a hacked Linux distro with proprietary blobs bolted on.<p>In the case of Canonical, they&#x27;re letting them know they&#x27;re trying to do LGPL things with a Linux that is actually GPL.<p>Edit2: GPLv2 says:<p>&gt; <i>Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you;</i><p>So distributing CDDL&#x27;d source and asking the user to do &quot;make zfs.ko&quot; is fine.<p>&gt; <i>rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.</i><p>This, among other places in GPLv2 is where they have problems with binaries.