Hellwig v. VMware
The Linux developer who sued VMware over the GPL in Germany, lost on evidence, and still got the disputed code removed.
Christoph Hellwig, one of the most prolific contributors to the Linux kernel, filed suit in Hamburg in March 2015 with backing from the Software Freedom Conservancy. The claim was that ESXi's kernel, vmkernel, combined with the vmklinux module, formed a derivative work of Linux and therefore had to be released under GPLv2.
The court dismissed the case in 2016 without ruling on that question: Hellwig hadn't shown clearly enough which parts of the copied code he personally held copyright in. The appeal was rejected in 2019. The lesson was that a kernel with thousands of authors is hard for any single one of them to defend. VMware nonetheless announced that vmklinux was going away, and ESXi 7.0 shipped without it in 2020.