I believe it's safe to assume that companies who are abusing patent law, who illegally redistribute non-source versions of patched GPL-licensed codebases, or who are playing dirty by technical tricks like Verisign is now doing, are all using several open source projects within the core of their operations.
What would happen if several popular open source licenses add exclusion clauses to their licenses, explicitly forbidding the use of these projects (like Bind, Debian, Python, sendmail/qmail, Apache) by such companies? Of course, this might be in conflict with clause 6 in the Open Source license definition, but if they don't play by the rules, why should we?
Steven,
IMO, the companies that aren't obeying the rules, won't obey them either if you impose more stringent rules.
Compare it to "Too many people drive too fast when the maximum speed is 90 km/h, let's reduce the maximum speed to 70 km/h". Will this stop people from driving 120?
Rules don't make any sense unless they're enforced. And to be honest, I still have to see the first occurrence of an enforced GNU rule.
About the enforcement of speed tickets: Bert's weblog (http://www.bertanciaux.be/) contains a recent article about the 30/50 km/h rules. Fairly interesting...
This of course is not the place to discuss Bert's proposition -- it was just an analogy, Rik.
But let's make it clear that I'm not against driving more slowly. I only doubt that the people who now drive 90 in my street, will suddenly drive 30 if they're only allowed 30 instead of 50. Only if there is one of those nice cameras they will. Like it or not, rules only make sense if they are enforced. And I'm not talking about the majority of the people, but about those few exceptions that aren't considerate of other people (out of financial or other motives).
Maybe I should've picked a less controversial analogy, but this one was the first that jumped to mind...