Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

http://www.fsf.org/news/2008-12-cisco-suit

by soundsop • 18 years ago

49 18 18 years ago

newt03113• 18 years ago

And more gibrish from the peanut gallery. Cisco by far is one of the friendliest companies to the open source movement. How friendly do you think they will be now?

graemep2• 18 years ago

They were producing proprietary derivatives of open source software, over a period of many years, in blatant violation of the license. How exactly is that friendly?

Create2• 18 years ago

"Yeager recalls, two support staff members, Bosack and Kirk Lougheed, asked him for his original program so they could modify it for the new system. Bosack and Lougheed removed its ability to route non-Internet protocols, keeping its network operating system and related features and improving its Internet capabilities. Later, they added back other protocols.

Yeager said he didn't know that Bosack had recently incorporated Cisco and asked Stanford for permission to sell the Blue Box commercially. He had been denied." [1]

Their whole business was built on this "borrowing" principle, but eventually some of it fired back [2] on the "original" gang, when they went "public" (Sequoia, hated by Lerner).

In essence, the following quote sums it all up: ``The fundamental problem is: how do you negotiate an equitable agreement with crooks?''

[1] http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html

[2] http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/serving_suits/cisco.html

brl3• 18 years ago

Blatant is not exactly the right word to describe the situation here.

http://tinyurl.com/5mw2ms

glymor2• 18 years ago

Cisco is a business not a child, I don't think they are going to take their toys and go home.

newt03113• 18 years ago

Thats exactly what they will do and business in general. Every lawsuit filed against a company violating GPL is another reason for companies not to use FOSS in the first place.

jyothi• 18 years ago

Doesn't this sound like suicide for FSF?

With violations like these involving bare necessities of any application like gcc, binutils people would have no option but to pay MSFT or other companies. On these lines FSF can sue pretty much everyone.

This seems more like something went wrong with Cisco and Stallman and they suddenly cropped up.

graemep2• 18 years ago

You do not understand what is happening.

Most people use this software within the license terms - most importantly they distribute it with an offer to provide the source, and provide the source if asked to.

Who is the everyone the FSF could sue? Do you know of anyone else distributing a non open source derivative of any of this software?

The whole point of the GPL is to prevent people from closing open source software. If they do not enforce, they may as well just give up and put their software in the public domain.

How exactly is buying from MS going to help them? MS has (or any proprietary supplier) much stricter license terms, and is much more aggressive about enforcing them.

I suspect you do not understand the GPL. Read the explanations on the FSF site.

glymor2• 18 years ago

The FSF works very hard to avoid having to sue. As the press release says they've been trying to get Cisco/Linksys to comply since 2003.

And it's not suicide for the FSF, Cisco will back down.

brl3• 18 years ago

When I first heard about this I thought that it sounded like suicide too but for entirely different reasons: If Cisco decides to fight rather than reconcile this case might not turn out the way everybody thinks it will.

And then what?

olefoo• 18 years ago

uh. Any decision that declared the GPL invalid would have to be so novel, and so far reaching that it would probably break all software licenses.

I truly doubt that Cisco (which describes itself as a software company) would want that to happen.

The fact that it's never been seriously challenged in court is more a testament to it's soundness than anything else. A number of brilliant legal minds have looked at it and decided that challenging it would not be a profitable endeavour.

rp• 18 years ago

The recent decision of Jacobsen v. Katzer (different jurisdiction) held that violation of an open source license can be a copyright violation, which is what is being claimed here. This filing suggests that they FSF was emboldened by the Jacobson case.

Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

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