- Sorry, you are interpreting, I am pointing to the licence text.
- Nobody stated “that all these players are violating the GPL” (except for you). Actually these companies (plus SUSE and many more) understand Open Source Software licensing and Open Source Software business models very well: Their basic software stacks are fully OSS, hence “worth nothing” (monetarily, i.e. the market value of their products is zero), they earn their money with services (support contracts etc.) revolving around the software they distribute. In short: They do not sell a proprietary software product based on (i.e. comprising) Qt components.
Jolla, on the contrary, insists on selling software licenses to us private users and hopes to acquire “big, commercial licensees” as they once did with Intex and OMP. Therefore Jolla proprietarised the basic SailfishOS by bundling their proprietary components (IIRC “Silica” etc.) into it (I am not addressing the proprietary, non-core components here, as AlienDalvik aka AAS, EAS (Exchange Active Sync), the T9 word scrambling software etc.). - But most importantly, the classic Linux distributors and Google’s AOSP team have no “users” who could insist on executing their rights according to GPL3! It is the companies running the software these provide, which may have to face such claims by their “users”. E.g. I had to sign a “Do and Don’t” list when I received IT from my employer (or the IT would not have been handed out to me), adding a section to waiver certain “user” rights the GPL3 provides (i.e. not to execute those rights) would be simple.
But Jolla seems to be afraid that such a legal requirement makes SailfishOS less attractive for “big, commercial licensees”, and they may be right, as Google had exactly this consideration when they decided to keep the basic AOSP *GPL3 free right from the start.
If Jolla would only arrive where other Linux distributors have arrived at long ago: It bears advantages to make the basic SailfishOS fully OSS licensed (plus access to OSS EU funding etc.), to develop in the open (not in a walled garden with infrequent code drops), to primarily work with a public bug tracker (instead of maintaining bug descriptions, bug status, etc. principally in Jolla’s JB database; likely a non-public Bugzilla instance) etc.
But Jolla stubbornly insists on staying a proprietary software company which utilises lots of OSS, instead of becoming a real OSS company with a truly OSS-based business model (i.e. generating revenue with services, not by selling licences for software products).
As I had the feeling when writing this that I rephrased things I had written years ago in aforementioned TMO thread, I really do not want to continue this here, expect somebody really has a new insight. Actually, even then the original TMO thread for this topic appears to be the more appropriate location, and only if somebody has a new insight I would be keen on continuing this topic there (at TMO).