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FSF Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

Posted by timothy on from the was-that-print-too-fine-for-you? dept.

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."

2 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe this wasn't intentional. by Samschnooks · · Score: 1, Redundant
    There's a lot of posts accusing of Cisco of intentionally violating the GPL; even an alleged ex-employee saying that Cisco "didn't care".

    It could be a misunderstanding of the GPL or bad advice from an expert. Why, if I asked a question about the GPL, I would get dozens of posts each having their own and differing "expert" opinion of what is meant.

  2. Am I mistaken? by slimjim8094 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I have a WRT54G (not the L, but before they went to that shitty crashy excuse of an OS.. v4 I think)

    Before I had DD-WRT on it, I went to the Linksys website to download firmware updates. The source was available.

    Has this since changed, or was it incomplete? I've always applauded Linksys (before they were Cisco) for specifically making the Linux-based GL for us tinkerers. You can pull off some cool shit with those routers.

    Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding.

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