Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations | Hacker News Reader

Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

fsf.org

49 pointssoundsop18 comments

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.

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?

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?

"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

... the other take-away:

"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work"

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

http://tinyurl.com/5mw2ms

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

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.

How is it to be enforced then? Its been 5 yrs. If uptake was the goal, it would have been BSD or public domain.

Here's how that will work out in a competitive market:

* Some companies will be fearful, because they don't understand, and, as you say, will indiscriminately avoid all open source software.

* Other companies will take the time and effort to understand what GPL, BSD, the Apache license, and the like mean and require of them, and as a consequence will be able to take advantage of open source software where it is appropriate. This will be a competitive advantage for them.

Perhaps but in the marginal case (Ie. for a company which is just on the edge of using a FOSS product), this could screw everybody over.

Only if they're clueless enough to not understanding the licensing. If you're basing your business on something, you should understand how it works, licensing included. It's really not all that difficult, and if you have doubts, there are tons of people you can ask for help. I've done a bit of that kind of work for pay in the past, although I obviously avoid actual 'legal' questions. I wouldn't mind getting more, but I don't think that it's that common, as it's just not that hard to understand, and there are tons of people who will answer questions for free.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

"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."

This is not true at all because regular software licenses are enforced under contract law and open source licenses are based on a legal theory about copyright law and granting permissions under a set of terms and conditions.

One way that this lawsuit could turn out to be a disaster is that the courts could decide to interpret the GPL as a contract rather than a (bare) license. As far as I can tell that would make it rather toothless and impractical to enforce.

When things that are as fundamental and important as that are still up in the air, you don't want to argue against Cisco's legal team about it.

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