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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."
I've worked at Cisco, and the general attitude among many (not all) is that they don't care about GPL violations. Linux is used as it's the fastest path to get the products out.
The reason why this will be unsettling to Cisco is because some of the products have integrated key IOS files in order to retain backwards compatibility. Which means that those files now fall under the GPL. And the only way to integrate them is to use various Linux API's. That is, key files are derived works from the GPL. From the bootstrap code on up.
But, since these files are key to IOS as well, one could take the view that IOS is now under the GPL.
One could try to maintain that those files need to be dual-licensed. However, though some hold that to be valid, I don't believe such a dual license has ever been held up in court. So that might get interesting if the FSF wanted to push it. In any case, it could be a useful bargaining chip.
In any case, those files don't have the appropriate copyrights stating how they are licensed.
The amusing part here is that this has come about mostly because of Cisco's dedication to using as much H1-B/L1 labor as possible. It's been those guys who have mostly (not entirely) done this work in order to get things done quickly. And believe me, protestations about the licensing have been ignored completely when they've been raised. Hack-it-in quickly and damn the lawyers has been the attitude.
It's very amusing to see that Cisco's use of cheap labor has come back to bite them in a way that has the potential to cost them more money than if they had done things in the right fashion originally.
Don't buy a linksys, but do buy one of the ones with similar hardware.
When I bought my Asus WL-500g Premium it shipped with the complete modified linux source in a folder on the CD that contained the usual windows-crapware you seem to get with every product these days (you know, the outdated copy of acrobat reader, some documentation wrapped in a shiny executable and such).
I did install OpenWRT on it, and I'm very happy with the result. I'm also happy with Asus for actually shipping the source, but I never did write them a line and told them. Maybe I should.
c++;
yeah - probably true.
Part of this was a chain reaction. Linksys was a low end router company and they adopted Linux to save money on development. As such, they had no need to cripple their routers to not compete against their high end brand, since they didn't have one. Unfortunately for Cisco, who bought them, they do have a high end brand, and releasing the source for their low end brand that people have tuned to outperform their high end routers (with overclocking and mods) is not really in their best interest (illegal, yes, in best interest, no).
Personally, I think they were gambling as long as possible that the FSF wouldn't file a suit.
Yes, it could be a misunderstanding. Especially when FSF has spent five years communicating with Cisco trying to resolve the issue peacefully. If there's a misunderstanding, the people at Cisco need to get some working brains...
The really weird thing is that the WRT54G, with Linux, cost $50 years ago. The new WRT54G, with less hardware, cost -- guess what -- $50 today! Or, alternatively, the WRT54GL costs more than $50. Isn't hardware supposed to get cheaper and better over time, rather than worse or more expensive?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Cisco is being REALLY REALLY stupid here and I just don't understand why.
I've done a lot of commercial software that uses LGPL and GPL code, and its not rocket science. RMS himself even says that "mere aggregation" is not a problem.
Here are the rules:
if its LGPL, link to it, but don't modify it. If you need to modify it, make the modification in the form of a generic API extension and call it from the application. Make your extensions public.
If it is GPL, make it a service and call it through a socket.
If it is a kernel module, there seems to be some wiggle room there, otherwise make a public mini-driver and a proprietary user space app.
How hard is that? Jeez, if you screw up GPL compliance, you are not paying attention.
Oh, my.
Imagine, for a moment, that various $BIG_COMPANIES decide they want to be able to use code from free software in their products without a fuss, while still keeping protection for their own code.
So, what they do is approach various national governments, WIPO, etc., and have copyright protection removed from source code.
The companies then sit back with the fact that their binary code is still copyright protected, and their source code is safely hidden under "trade secret" protections . . . but the source code of free software is neither copyrighted nor secret. So the companies can take the known, non-copyrighted source code from free software, and combine it with their secret source code to make their copyrighted binary blobs . . .
I know full well where the tech came from, I supported the former Aironet employees for 3 years after they were bought by Cisco =) The VxWorks stuff was more stable than IOS at least for the first year or two after IOS was ported and if our AP's at work are any indication that's still true as of a few years ago (noone is using them but they still crash once in a while).
p.s.
An interesting aside, the VxWorks software was also easier to maintain since it was written in modern C++ vs old straight C for IOS. This became very clear one day when a particular large school called and said all of their AP's were rebooting randomly at fairly short intervals. It turns out they had a HUGE flat network with 28k+ visible MAC addresses. This was more than the AP's were speced for but Cisco couldn't just let a large customer's install die, so after they figured out the cause they had to come up with a solution. For the VxWorks code they simply modified the MAC table class and recompiled, a patch was available within a few hours of the trouble starting. The IOS patch was much more difficult with tons of searching through header files and later after the first patch failed searching through the entire codebase. The small minority of new AP's which were running IOS were flashed in the field to VxWorks with an unsupported dev tool because officially the 'upgrade' to IOS was one way.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.