If the punishment for blatantly violating the GPL or LGPL for years at a time while raking in millions of dollars in profits is getting bitched at on the internet, it seems likely to me that a lot of companies will do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that GPL compliance isn't really worth the hassle.
It was definitely made clear to the offenders that they would be taken to court, and at that point most of them opted to settle. For those that didn't, the court stuff was mostly uneventful. The judge would tell them they had to comply with the license, they would either stonewall or give us a (usually non-working) dump of their code & build system, ad infinitum, until we told them we were going to ask the judge for an injunction. That was usually sufficient motivation.
The reason there are no court cases is because we had them dead to rights and their lawyers knew it. Their lawyers told them there was no point in fighting, and to just give us what we wanted.
The lawyers are on staff at those organizations, but I'm not familiar with the details of how their funding works. They are both non-profits, though, so if you're curious you can pull their Form 990s.
I don't know what the monetary damages were. I was never purview to those conversations (as I said, I was only handling the technical side of things). I heard through the grape vine that some of them requested damages as well as compliance, but I don't know for sure.
Source: I run PortableApps.com and have had my GPL software used illegally by competing projects in other countries as well as at least one Fortune 500 here in the states.
For Linux and OSX, it would be cool to see similar things.. though I've seen some interesting things using Dropbox that may yeild a portable *nix app solution one day.
It would be great if the code of that library (hardware acceleration for audio/video decoding/encoding) was released with an open license. I hope it happens.
What is sad, is that the OP in the Google Group thread is using the "bitch about it hard and loud" strategy. Trying to be negative and so on. It's not a constructive attitude.
Working with companies like this is often like working with young children. Usually, calmly saying "please don't do that" doesn't work (and, indeed, doesn't appear to be working with Allwinner after 4 years of pointing out GPL violations); you have to make it plain and clear that what the child / company is doing is bad behavior, and that it's making you or someone else upset.
I'd be more inclined to take your side on this and criticize Luc if Allwinner actually had a good track record of responding immediately and adequately to such (L)GPL violations. From what I can tell, however, neither have been the case, and I therefore completely understand (and even agree with) Luc's visible hostility.
That's why we see as few lawsuits as we do.
I think an author with a proper lawyer would be able to use the DMCA to shut them down rather quickly - meaning it won't drag out for ages.
That guy who started the thread on Google Groups (Luc), is prone to polarizing the discussion. I suppose that Allwinner can fix the issue and still keep their library closed. That would be bad for everyone.
What you want is code that you can commit back into your reposority but what you get is some code that is quickly hacked together and you don't even want to look at.