K Street or G Street?
First of all I don’t believe there is anything wrong with accepting corporate funding. The issue at hand is that corporate funding shouldn’t dictate or suggest the direction of an organization.
The FSF has three tiers of funding each receiving the same benefits. The only difference is that each tier is represented on the Patron List in groups. The first tier is $30,000. The Second tier is $25,000 and Under. The Third tier is $15,000 and Under. You can see who contributes the most as they are listed first.
Joe, I've been doing GPL enforcement for about ten years. When I count the number of the products on the market that include GPL'd software, and the number of violations, the percentage stays constant. There are more violations because more are adopting GPL'd software. Also, we slowly see specific industries learn their lesson. I think we're nearing the end of the "home router as the default violation" era. If you look at the lawsuit, there are only a few router products among the many listed. We're in a new age of consumer electronics violations. It will take time to improve compliance there, but I certainly think given that we have only a few parties around the world (FSF, SFLC, and gpl-violations.org) even bothering to enforce GPL, we're doing a really efficient job! If folks have concrete suggestions on how to make our work more efficient, I'd love to hear about it.
Meanwhile, denying rights forever under v2 doesn't seem right to me. The goal in GPL compliance work is to ultimately encourage more use of Free Software in a compliant way. The idea of being hard-nosed with the GPL might be permitted by the letter of the license, but I think refusing to restore someone's rights who makes a successful effort to come into compliance is against the spirit of the GPL.