They are asking for profits because that is one of the legal remedies they are entitled to. It sounds pretty severe, like Cisco stands to lose a lot of money but I really doubt that the FSF would be awarded anything here.
The defendant (Cisco) gets to deduct "the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work." (17 U.S.C. ยง 504 of the US Copyright Act).
I imagine if you take the profit from a single revision of a firmware image and subtract everything that is not attributable to the Readline library (for example, named in the complaint) you can safely round that down to zero.
The defendant (Cisco) gets to deduct "the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work." (17 U.S.C. ยง 504 of the US Copyright Act).
I imagine if you take the profit from a single revision of a firmware image and subtract everything that is not attributable to the Readline library (for example, named in the complaint) you can safely round that down to zero.