It's been 20 years since the first in-court enforcement of the GNU General Public License. This anniversary provides an occasion for a retrospective on what, how and why happened back then - both as a reminder to those who have been around, or as a history lesson to the younger generation.

In the early 2000s, the IT industry was already adopting Linux and other FOSS on a massive scale, but at the same time did not generally concern themselves a lot with license compliance. This in turn lead to a spike of enforcement activities.

During the last two decades, many improvements in compliance related awareness, processes and tooling have happened. Does this mean the license compliance question has been solved?