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Bradley Kuhn - Fork and ignore: fighting a GPL violation by coding instead
Typically, GPL enforcement activity involves copyright infringement actions which compel license violators to correct errors in their GPL compliance, defending the policy goals of the GPL: the rights of developers and users to copy, share, modify and redistribute.
While traditional enforcement is often undeniably necessary for embedded electronics products, novel approaches to GPL violations are often possible and even superior for more traditional software distributions.
Recently, Software Freedom Conservancy engaged in an enforcement action whereby, rather than fight the violator in court, we instead provided resources and assistance to a vetted GPL-compliant fork of a violating codebase.
This talk discusses which scenarios make this remedy optimal and the lessons learned. The talk includes some licensing and technical content about vetting the licensing information of codebases.