Are there any organizations that pursue GPL violations that would stick to clear-cut cases of GPL violations where there is strong concensus among OSS developers that violations have occurred like the BMW case?

For full disclosure, I am one of the ZoL developers. I believe that ZoL can prevent certain types of storage related failures that other production solutions do not, including those on systems intended to keep people alive. My desire to see that has required that I make an effort to understand what the GPL permits and what it restricts. So far, my talks with lawyers have suggested that my (and others') work in ZoL is legally alright under copyright law.

The SFC considers easy access to ZoL binaries to complicate their arguments in certain GPL enforcement cases and rather than accept that reality to the benefit of the wider community, the SFC has opted to claim that ZoL binaries as distributed by Canonical are themselves a GPL violation. While I want to see the BMW case litigated, wanting to see GPL violations litigated and contributing to an organization that calls any use of OSS a GPL violation whenever it perceives the possibility of a court agreeing that claim to make litigation of certain cases of actual violations slightly easier are two different things.

I haven't followed the ZFS stuff much at all, but SFC's news post about it the other day did make me wonder why they were doing it. I think it's important to enforce the GPL and other copy-left licenses when they are being blatantly violated, even if the original authors no longer care about the project. But if it's an unintentional license incompatibility, where the spirit of the licenses are roughly aligned, who really cares? Who is benefiting by bothering Canonical or the ZFS-on-Linux developers with these license concerns?

In my case, SFC is pro-bono council for the Wine project, from which I derive my income. So even if I don't always completely understand what they do, I feel I should pitch in because they contribute to my livelihood. I'm not a legal guy, I don't pay super close attention to this stuff, I trust them to do something not far from "the right thing."

It might help if you wrote to them telling them how you feel. I will not think badly of you whatever you decide to do going forward. I realize that this is an awkward situation and if I were you, I would probably have made the same decisions.

The unfortunate situation aside, thank you for your work on Wine. Wine has been helpful to me on multiple occasions. :)