Edit: It's "without also providing source code under the terms of the GPL " - this is a nuance of the GPL's attempt at re-defining a term of art - "derived work". 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.
> 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 'make' into a terminal?
Who says they're expending resources on Canonical? They've left NVidia alone, because they don't ship GPL'd software. They're spending on VMWare, because they ship a hacked Linux distro with proprietary blobs bolted on.
In the case of Canonical, they're letting them know they're trying to do LGPL things with a Linux that is actually GPL.
Edit2: GPLv2 says:
> Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you;
So distributing CDDL'd source and asking the user to do "make zfs.ko" is fine.
> rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
This, among other places in GPLv2 is where they have problems with binaries.