I'm not a lawyer, nor am I very familiar with contract law, so take this with a grain of salt.
I think technically yes, practically it is a separate up hill battle. Monetary damages have to be not-speculative, something like "because of defendant not complying with the contract I ended up spending <this> money on <these> software licenses" would probably work, but something like "because of defendant not complying with the contract I ended up making an inferior product (since I had to rewrite this code from scratch)" probably wouldn't.
I doubt that leaves many big lawsuits, it's hard to think of concrete damages that result from people improperly modifying and distributing linux (unfortunately common). Maybe customers of ChessBase who purchased Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 (context: [1]) would have a claim for the return of their license fees, since if ChessBase was properly distributing it as GPL software they almost certainly would have been able to acquire it for free - that's like $50/person though - not a huge money maker.
I think technically yes, practically it is a separate up hill battle. Monetary damages have to be not-speculative, something like "because of defendant not complying with the contract I ended up spending <this> money on <these> software licenses" would probably work, but something like "because of defendant not complying with the contract I ended up making an inferior product (since I had to rewrite this code from scratch)" probably wouldn't.
I doubt that leaves many big lawsuits, it's hard to think of concrete damages that result from people improperly modifying and distributing linux (unfortunately common). Maybe customers of ChessBase who purchased Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 (context: [1]) would have a claim for the return of their license fees, since if ChessBase was properly distributing it as GPL software they almost certainly would have been able to acquire it for free - that's like $50/person though - not a huge money maker.
[1] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che...