I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.
This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.
You obviously misunderstood my earlier post.
In this case we have serious concerns about the behavior of a particular company, Cittio. Perhaps these concerns are unfounded, but my question was to ask for advice concerning how to go about, perhaps, getting rid of these concerns. The GPL is a license based on copyright law, and thus doesn't even take affect until a "copy" is distributed, so of course Cittio is under no legal obligation to reveal how they are using OpenNMS until they actually provide the code.
Now, I should note that they have configured a demo system for this client to use on the client's hardware. While I am most definitely not a lawyer, that could be construed as "distribution", although it could be argued that no ownership has changed hands. In any case, the fact that their use of OpenNMS was not clearly disclosed (as is recommended by the GPL Violations Vendor FAQ) was enough to cause us some concern. If there is nothing to hide, why not be up front about it?
This happened right after we received a query from a Cittio software engineer looking to compile one of our GPL'd libraries. Now, if they are truly using OpenNMS in an unmodified fashion, why the question? Can't they just use OpenNMS as distributed? Again, there is probably a simple answer, but I am at a loss as to how to get it.
It seems that your recommendation (along with many others) is to just forget about it or to hire a lawyer. Neither is very useful to me.
Chemistry professors never die, they just fail to react.