
Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations - soundsop
http://www.fsf.org/news/2008-12-cisco-suit
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rp
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.

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newt0311
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?

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graemep
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?

~~~
Create
"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>

~~~
Create
... 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"

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jyothi
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.

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brl
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?

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olefoo
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.

~~~
brl
"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.

