FSF Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

Brett Smith writes "This morning the Free Software Foundation filed suit against Cisco for violations of the GPL and LGPL. There's a blog post with background about the case. The full complaint is available too." The short version, as excerpted by reader byolinux, is that "in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software."

Comments

Re:This is why copyright laws are bad

[LarsG]

BSD and the like are more "free" for the developer / manufacturer while GPL is more "free" for the user / recipient of the software.

Which license that is more free depends on whose freedom one is concerned about.

Not exactly

[Crispy Critters]

Look at what the FSF is asking for: an injunction to stop Cisco from distributing any more code, pay damages, give previous profits to the FSF, and pay the FSF's costs.

This is not exactly "put some code on the web for download."

If you mean that Linksys/Cisco could have avoided this at any time in the past five years by releasing the code, you are probably right. The FSF is easy to get along with. It is anybody's guess what they need to offer the FSF now to make it go away.

Re:This is why copyright laws are bad

[calmofthestorm]

The way I see it, the free software community is just another company. We use each other's work, just like members of a company usually can, provided we agree on the ground rules. We work for communal benefit.

So let me ask you: If I get access to the windows source code via a contract (copyright) with Microsoft, should I be able to take Microsoft's work and sell it for personal profit? This is of course absurd. I see it as equally absurd that other companies should be able to take the open source community's work for free. They get the binaries and sources under a contract, they can follow it or their rights terminate.

A better example: Someone wrote a library that does something I want, and will license it to me for like $5 per copy for use in my software. Does this give me the right to take it for free (assuming I can) because I don't want to raise my product's prices to cover the increased cost? No. I can either accept their terms or not.

Of course I also don't buy all this omfg "free software good, bad software bad" crap. We're a company that works for its own interest, plain and simple. Just one that produces products far more to my liking, far more intuitive to my (granted, odd) mind, and far more useful in my line of work (CS research)