Protecting the open-source license commons

I agree.

But it seems the biggest copyright holders in the kernel space don't want to enforce the GPL, so it will never be enforced.

At least there is some will to try to bring some selected folks into compliance - I remember Microsoft suddenly "donating" source code for their HyperV Network drivers -, whether or not this works well, I can not really judge, but its better than nothing. If it was just something like Apache 2, not even this would happen.