Strategies in practical GPL enforcement Enforcement of copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL has always been a somewhat controversial topic. Some people are not in favor of enforcement at all (but then, why choose the GPL and not a permissive license?). Other people have less inhibitions in enforcing the license. But then this raises the next questions? Enforcement using which strategy? Enforcement using which methods? The Linux Kernel developer community has recently re-fueled that debate on the ksummit-discuss mailing list. Ultimately, most projects and developers are looking for the downstream developers and companies to participate in a collaborative development model. The copyleft principle is just a legal "hack" to codify some part of that based on copyright. As a result, license compliance is not an end in itself, but the very bare legal minimum of what needs to be done when engaging in (particularly corporate/commercial) re-use of Free Software. This talk will look at the different (GPL) license enforcement approaches and present their advantages and disadvantages.