Huawei vs Nortel (Canada) is a far more interesting story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco#1984%E2%80%931995:_Origi...
>On July 11, 1986, Bosack and Lougheed were forced to resign from Stanford and the university contemplated filing criminal complaints against Cisco and its founders for the theft of its software, hardware designs, and other intellectual properties.[15]
Presumably Stanford eventually figured out that it was a tech incubator.
> The way royalties work, a third goes to the school, a third goes to the department and a third goes to the inventor. I gave my third back to my department because essentially all of this stuff is born out of a great research environment.
Presumably most of the royalties came from Cisco. Cisco's founders would certainly have known that Stanford owned the hardware design and software, as well as any copyrights or patents, and that licensing would be required.
It sounds like Yeager's biggest complaint was that Cisco didn't give him (and Bechtolsheim) credit for their work.
The debug messages even still said Cisco. It was ridiculous.
And for what it's worth, they were network switches/routers, not servers. Cisco didn't make 'servers' back in the day.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674627/3com-huawei-joint-...