Cisco Slaps Arista Networks With Suit For "Brazen" Patent Infringement

alphadogg writes Cisco has filed two lawsuits against data center switch competitor Arista Networks for allegedly violating its intellectual property. One suit is for patent infringement, which charges Arista with violating 14 Cisco patents for 12 features in the Arista EOS operating system. The second suit is for extensive copying of Cisco's user manuals and command line structures, right down to the grammatical errors within them. "This is not an accident but a strategy," says a source familiar with the matter. "It was a deliberate, brazen and blatant intellectual property violation in order to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Arista's shortcutting to get to market and win share."

Comments

Come on people,

[bruce_the_loon]

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, run the manuals through Google Translate twice and then run Word's grammar checks.

If you copy verbatim, you gonna get caught.

Re:Come on people,

[gnupun]

If you copy verbatim, you gonna get caught.

Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure? If you did this copying stuff at school, you'd be kicked out of the school. But in the real world, copying will get you bushels of green paper.

Re:Come on people,

[sumdumass]

The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.

In short, they didn't really care about getting kicked out of school. They only wanted invited into the computer labs. Once in, it is easier to stay in.

Re:Come on people,

[Anonymous Coward]

If you copy verbatim, you gonna get caught.

Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure? If you did this copying stuff at school, you'd be kicked out of the school. But in the real world, copying will get you bushels of green paper.

much easier to gain market share if everyone that can already use Cisco kit can switch to your kit with zero training.

Re:Come on people,

[Livius]

there would be no learning cure for their products.

I'm thinking that was maybe meant to be curve, but I haven't read the manual and maybe the cure is something someone would try to stop.

Re:Come on people,

[sumdumass]

I'm thinking you are correct. Good catch.

Re:Come on people,

[gweihir]

On the other hand, after this "procedure", you will need a tram of language forensics to discover the original meaning...

Re:Come on people,

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here -- "If you did this copying stuff at school, you'd be kicked out of the school.

With all the plagiarism stories on SlashDot, you should know that plagiarism is not the big "No No" that it use to be.
Academia still is the Capitol of Plagiarism with "Research" (typically a specialized part of Academia) a close second.
The students have slipped from their top ranking--that is, if they ever had it.
And it no longer means the end of one's current educational career--the Government Schools can't afford to dump a cheater.
The same with colleges and universities.
Politicians follow in third place.
News columnists and authors are fourth.
Students pull up the rear. Dead last in smarts, planning and application.

SlashDot and the rest of the news carries these stories. Read some of them.

Re:Come on people,

[bruce_the_loon]

There's a difference between copying the command syntax, which has been held as valid in some jurisdictions, and photocopying the manuals.

Re:Come on people,

[mysidia]

Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure?

Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors.

This would be like BSD authors suing Linux developers for copyright infringemenet, for copying the /etc/fstab file format.

Re:Come on people,

[TWX]

I'm thinking that he copied an error without checking it...

Re:Come on people,

[TWX]

The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.

Honestly they all do it. I've used Foundry (now Brocade) and the commands are essentially the same. Even the stupid things that Cisco does "for legacy reasons" (blecch!) are duplicated.

It looks like this company's failure was that they didn't rewrite their manuals. They probably could have drafted a whole bunch of examples of what the commands did, then had a second team create new instructions based on interpreting what the examples called for, and been fine.

Cisco has a LOT of errors in their docs. I went through a training course recently that used Cisco-supplied books, and all four books were loaded with errors. We spent far too much time crossing-out and rewriting the bad sections given what the course cost (almost $4000) for me to be happy with it. But if someone ripped-off their training documentation verbatim there'd be ample proof they did so.

Re:Come on people,

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some work for a company that used Dell switches - they had a CLI that's enough like Cisco IOS that you think you know what you're doing and different enough that you'll mess something up.

Re:Come on people,

[TWX]

Cisco has a lot of legacy garbage that haunts new entrants into their gear though. There are things kept around for historical reasons that were built on other things for historical reasons that in turn were built on different things yet that are no longer there. As an example, on a brand new 3650CG switch one has to "switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q" before "switchport mode trunk" even though no one uses ISL anymore, and even many new Cisco products don't support anything other than 802.1q trunking.

Hell, that one has to type "configure terminal" when you're SSHed in to a switch and obviously trying to configure it from the terminal is silly.

I would be glad for a clean-sheet design that still plays well with console access, or to deconstruct the existing commands to remove things that don't work or are silly and to fix those which need fixed.

Re:Come on people,

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Cisco has a LOT of errors in their docs. I went through a training course recently that used Cisco-supplied books, and all four books were loaded with errors. We spent far too much time crossing-out and rewriting the bad sections given what the course cost (almost $4000) for me to be happy with it. But if someone ripped-off their training documentation verbatim there'd be ample proof they did so.

Canary traps. ;-)

Re: Come on people,

[thegameiam]

The cruft that gets me is how each routing protocol has a completely different way to specify netmasks:
OSPF: network 10.10.10.0 0.0.0.255 area 0
BGP: network 10.10.10.0 mask 255.255.255.0
etc.

Would implementing a parser for "/24" be THAT hard?

Re: Come on people,

[schwit1]

Not just routing protocols, but simple syntax

#ping vrf ABC123 8.8.8.8
#telnet 8.8.8.8 /vrf ABC123

Re: Come on people,

[TWX]

I kind of get why, in certain circumstances, wildcard masking is used instead of subnet masking, but I agree, it's a pain in the ass and they really should have found ways of making it less annoying.

Right now I'm ACL hell, and different types of ACLs have just enough differences in formatting to enter them that I keep having to go back to the literature. Given that I'm working on teaching myself routing so I'm running lots of vlans on trunk interfaces this is becoming a headache with so many lists to maintain.

Re:Come on people,

[Anonymous Coward]

The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.

In short, they didn't really care about getting kicked out of school. They only wanted invited into the computer labs. Once in, it is easier to stay in.

Actually, they wanted to be Vice President.

Why Biden's plagiarism shouldn't be forgotten.

Joe Biden. Serial plagiarist. And that's Slate - hardly a Rush Limbaugh dittohead.

Re:Come on people,

[TheGratefulNet]

cisco owns the cli (has for nearly 20 yrs now). its the industry standard cli, like it or not.

you HAVE to do the cli a-la cisco if you want in, in the networking biz.

everyone (other than jnpr) does it and for good reason.

now, copying the manual is a bit too much; but the cli is fair game and it was smart to use the cisco cli style.

Re:Come on people,

[TheGratefulNet]

ob disc: I work at cisco (right now, at least).

yes, their docs suck. reason: they hire cut-rate 'writers' from india who can't write to save their lives. things are rushed here (like everywhere), there is no time or money for proofreading and experts don't do reviews (again, this is everywhere). the writers are left on their own, mostly, and they have tight schedules.

tl;dr: its all about money and cisco does not care about writers or manuals. I could find at least a typo on every other page, these days. sigh ;(

Re:Come on people,

[hairyfeet]

But can you patent CLI commands? Sure I can understand the GUI and the manual being patented or copyrighted but the CLI commands? Does that mean every time someone writes a program they have to pick arbitrary keys to make it different?

Re:Come on people,

[stoborrobots]

Hell, that one has to type "configure terminal" when you're SSHed in to a switch and obviously trying to configure it from the terminal is silly.

Umm, except by default, you're in diagnostic mode. When you remote in, the system assumes that you're trying to check something. Configuring stuff is a high risk endeavour, so you need to explicitly choose to enter that mode.

It's akin to the i command in vim to enter insert mode to type text.

Re:Come on people,

[Anonymous Coward]

Drivel.

Re:Come on people,

[greenfruitsalad]

I find juniper's config mode and config file structure rather beautiful. As for their cli syntax, I don't actually see it as very different from cisco's.

if you want to clear arp cache, it makes sense that that's the actual command. no sane company would have "please make forgettings ...." or similar nonsense.

but anyway, did cisco really invent this cli syntax type? there's the Unix way of "command -x=1 -y=2 object" and there's the OpenVMS way of "command specifier anotherspecifier object". I don't think cisco can ever claim to have invented this non-unixlike cli.

i've never worked with anything older than openvms, so it's possible there's even more prior art.

Re:Come on people,

[gnupun]

you HAVE to do the cli a-la cisco if you want in, in the networking biz.

No, you don't HAVE to have it, it's Cisco's. Create your version. Things like UI and command line should have legal protection beyond the vanilla patent and copyright protections. We need new types of protections for each type of IP (command line for example).

Re:Come on people,

[Dishevel]

It is sad really, but all the fun here starts at -1.

Join in

Lower that slider.

Re:Come on people,

[jon3k]

That's interesting because I've found Cisco documentation to be pretty damn good, compared to the rest of the industry. Especially considering the breadth of their product line up.

Re:Come on people,

[jon3k]

Um, you seem confused. There's a very good reason you specify terminal (which is the default btw, all you have to do is type conf and hit enter twice)

Router#conf ?
confirm Confirm replacement of running-config with a new config file
memory Configure from NV memory
network Configure from a TFTP network host
overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host
replace Replace the running-config with a new config file
revert Parameters for reverting the configuration
terminal Configure from the terminal
<cr>

Re: Come on people,

[sjames]

The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. Much of it seems to have been acquired from outside, hacked down to a core functionality and them bolted on.

I presume they don't just re-write the parsing because it's all cut/pasted rather than well factored.

Re:Come on people,

[sjames]

And what';s the deal with cars! Someone should patent the steering wheel, brake on the left, gas to the right. Let someone reverse the pedals and provide a tiller bar for steering. Someone can use steering levers. Won't that be FUN!!!??

Re:Come on people,

[mysidia]

Hell, that one has to type "configure terminal" when you're SSHed in to a switch and obviously trying to configure it from the terminal is silly.

Correct... but just as with other APIs; renaming the command is a breaking change. It doesn't matter whether it's a software program or a human interfacing with it, the command configure terminal has to place the device in configuration mode, if you want interoperability with templates and procedures that users developed to configure their network when they were running Cisco equipment.

You understand right, that IOS is a programming language... and if a competitor makes the 'configure terminal' command not work in their CLI, then users cannot take the work put into designing and developing the templates they built/programmed with many engineering man hours for deploying their Cisco gear and use the template to configure the competitor's gear?

Of course Cisco would like to use the CLI as a burden against people switching, since they will have to rebuild their developed templates from scratch then.

Just like Microsoft would like to force you to write all your documents over again if you switch from Microsoft Word to Office; this is basically anticompetitive behavior in the form of covertly tricking your users into using non-standardized file formats, and then attempting to abuse intellectual property laws to support your vendor lock-in.

Competitors should be allowed to reverse-engineer or use the publicly available knowledge about your file formats, however, otherwise, you indeed have an unfair monopoly protection.

Re:Come on people,

[davester666]

From the sounds of it, that's what Cisco did, so of course Arista will have the same text.

Re:Come on people,

[hairyfeet]

ACs can suck my big hairy nutsack. When I get a "NO AC" button? Fine and dandy but until then the ACs can eat a dick. The whole point of sites like this is conversations, ACs shit all over that very concept. If you want ACs shitting in your face with no way to do anything about it? That is YOUR choice but I'm not dealing with those wastes of electronic space.

Re:Come on people,

[Dishevel]

Wow. For a guy who never sees ACs, you get a mighty piss on about them.

Re:Come on people,

[stoatwblr]

"Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors."

IOS command line structure was quite different to the old Bay and other equipment I cut my teeth on in the early 90s, but it's now ubiquitious - mainly because it's not byzantine.

Nonetheless, cisco HAVE sued competitors over similar command structures, which is one of the reasons that there are a few online translation pages between Huawei/cisco/hp commands which do identical things but are called different names.

Re: Come on people,

[stoatwblr]

"The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. "

It's a swiss army knife, only less well designed.

Sendmail is just as bad and for much the same reasons.

At some point you have to decide that all that complexity IS the problem (especially for security) and the best thing to do is start over.

Re: Come on people,

[sjames]

Actually, sendmail is more cohesive. Their error was making the config language a bizarre form of pattern matching amounting to a Turing complete (but bizarre) language.

IOS is LITERALLY bits and pieces bolted together with dabs of glue logic. Different parts have a different mask syntax because they were once separate pieces of software.

Re:Come on people,

[hairyfeet]

Then YOU tell me smart guy WTF is the point of ACs then? The ENTIRE APPEAL of sites like this is to have a DIALOG, yes? Well ACs will never see any response and therefor it is practically made for taking a big shit on a page and walking away so why in the fuck would I want to see ACs? So I can see the ONE decent post out of forty or so shills and trolls?

If they can't bother to spend 2 minutes of their time to make a fucking account why should I waste one second of my time reading their puke, huh? they can either get off their lazy asses and make an account so they can stand by their statements or they can DIAF for all I care because I'm never gonna see their shit. Funny that all those that try to defend the AC system can't come up with a single reason on why i should give a single fuck about some worthless ACs.

Re:Come on people,

[metaforest]

an AC probably trolled him in a reply. Most of us get emails from DICE when someone replies to a submission we have made... AC or not. I'm guessing the AC pissed in Hairyfeet's cornflakes.

Re:Come on people,

[Dishevel]

All I am saying is that when discussing something you never see you use a serious amount of caps.

Also there are a few legit reasons for AC posting. I do it once in a while when I want to post about something and not let it be known who I am. For reasons that have to do with my job. I do not work with any top secret clearances or anything but sometimes it is better if I am not identified.

Re:Come on people,

[hairyfeet]

Can you read? What does my sig say? Yet when I log into Slash I still see that somebody has replied to several of my posts only to click on the post and see "replies below your threshold" which means an AC took a sheeit. so when Slash actually respects your settings and doesn't tell you that somebody has replied when they are below the threshold you have set? then I won't bitch, until then they can choke on a dick.

Re:Come on people,

[Dishevel]

At this point I believe your anger to be a troll. Too much anger for too small of a thing.

When you copy even the typographical errors

[Anonymous Coward]

When you copy even the typographical errors you have a problem.

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[gweihir]

Ether they have been terminally stupid, or this is an artifact of using the same tool, e.g. the broken, but widely used "word".

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[__aaltlg1547]

Word grammar checking is better than what most people post, unedited, on the web. In fact, it's better than copy produced by major news organizations and that's (in theory if not in practice) reviewed by professional human editors. And it's way better than the shitty grammar checking you get with LibreOffice, for instance.

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[Zontar The Mindless]

Not only is this not an "artifact" of using the same tool, it's not even an artefact of using the same tool.

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[Deadstick]

When you copy even the typographical errors you have a problem.

Yeah, at least they could create their own, like the Commodore 64 "kernal"...

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[sexconker]

No, you just spewed some bullshit and got called out for being a dipshit.

Re:When you copy even the typographical errors

[gweihir]

You wish....

lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck all lawyers, may they all die a slow painful death

Brazen?

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly can't hear the word Brazen without mentally adding 'overtures' to it and hearing
snips from The Music Man.

Just had to get that out.

ty.

Re:Brazen?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always read it as brazzers

Re:Brazen?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's the one with 76 trombone players.

Oh, wait. That still doesn't narrow it down.

shortcutting to get to market and win share

[Threni]

You don't need a shortcut, if you're on windows. Just type
net use //machine/share

Re:shortcutting to get to market and win share

[sumdumass]

That won't work.. I just tried it and got a message about a problem with my network. I doubt that is what a network hardware vendor is trying to accomplish.

Deja vu

[seoras]

Huawei did the same thing when they launched their first routers.
Worse even. They just copied the Cisco IOS code replacing the string "Cisco Systems Inc" with "Huawei"
Cisco won in court because Huawei's routers had the exact same bugs and spelling mistakes in the IOS CLI.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

I love that these competitors make it so easy for network engineers to switch products. If only they fixed a few of the idiosyncratic IOS things that everyone can't stand they would easily have superior products.

Re:Deja vu

[gweihir]

Nice. On the other hand, this is how technology gets cheaper and better, so maybe the problem is with IP protection times being far, far too long?

Re:Deja vu

[Kohath]

Huawei copied the code. Arista just made the command line commands look the same (according to the article).

Can you copyright a CLI language? I'm not sure you can.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

>Can you copyright a CLI language?

According to the most recent development in the oracle/google lawsuits, you can. God help us all if that stands on appeal.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Well, God help the US IT industry, anyway. Even with the dubious "diplomacy" the US employs when it comes to exporting intellectual property laws, I expect most of the world would see such an obvious and needless barrier to competition and interoperability for what it is. Prohibiting that kind of competition in the US would just be good for... well, everyone who develops software in another jurisdiction, basically, as long as those other jurisdictions don't propagate the mistake.

Re: Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Arista software is vastly different from Cisco's underneath the covers. The IOS CLI is 'emulated' on Arista boxes in Python. I don't think you'll find Python anywhere on Cisco IOS.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point! The laws concerning I.P. seem to be broken, and i believe it to be holding us back ( to some extent anyway )

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like why isn't mickey mouse public domain? Why should one person be granted exclusive right to a 100 year old idea, come up with by a guy who died a long time ago...

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

(Seriously, how is that off-topic? It's a reasonable assessment of the current mood in places like Europe, and I personally know people who would be in exactly the position to benefit that I described if the US does stick with the legal position as it apparently stands today and so conveniently removes some of the competition that would otherwise exist for European firms.)

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

POSIX, Single unix specification (SUS), ...

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if Mickey Mouse is the best example, as the company Disney is still alive, and even continues to feature Mickey Mouse in their works. In my opinion, it makes sense for them to retain the rights to the character.

design copy fail

[Anonymous Coward]

The initials of the people who designed a circuit was found on a clone for our product. It wasn't an exact photocopy, yet kept the silkscreen left wife nothing to do with the operation.

They copied the harmless bugs, too.

I get copying but...

[Cantankerous Cur]

why copy Cisco of all people?! I mean, ridiculous boot times, incomprehensible backend, and more recently, mediocre programming.

Re:I get copying but...

[lucm]

please tell us what is, in your informed opinion, a "people" worthy of being copied. Juniper? Avaya? HP? Huawei? Some obscure russian brand?

Re:I get copying but...

[Anonymous Coward]

they only copied the CLI, which is debatably copyrightable, not the boot times, backend or code.

Re:I get copying but...

[Burdell]

Most of those have cloned Cisco's IOS CLI and configuration structure, at least to some extent. Juniper's JUNOS was intentionally NOT written to clone IOS; instead they "invented" their own CLI and configuration structure from scratch. While it has its own warts, JUNOS is vastly superior to IOS ("commit confirm" FTW!).

Re:I get copying but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people don't know IOS is just running iptables in Linux.

Re:I get copying but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those have cloned Cisco's IOS CLI and configuration structure, at least to some extent. Juniper's JUNOS was intentionally NOT written to clone IOS; instead they "invented" their own CLI and configuration structure from scratch. While it has its own warts, JUNOS is vastly superior to IOS ("commit confirm" FTW!).

IOS-XR brings this same concept of atomic commits:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/xr12000/software/xr12k_r3-9/system_management/command/reference/yr39xr12k_chapter5.html#wp1873946320

Cheaper, too

[JBMcB]

And, since Arista didn't have to pay anyone to actually write the manuals or develop the command syntax, they can charge less for their products.

Re:Cheaper, too

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You might consider the possibility that if Arista did charge less for their devices -- maybe much less, if say they were promoting a different business model that wasn't based primarily on very high margins on hardware sales -- then one possible consequence might be that Cisco would be terrified that their goose that lays golden eggs was on its death bed.

Not that I'm in any way claiming that this hypothetical scenario does have anything to do with anything, you understand. It's just a possibility that you might consider.

Re:Cheaper, too

[stoatwblr]

Cisco's business model isn't centred on overpriced hardware - they'll drop to match everyone else if prodded about it. Noone ever pays list pricing and 90% discounts aren't unheard of.

Their model is in overpriced support contracts(which aren't discounted - ever), overpriced training courses, "noone ever got fired for buying Cisco" and extensive FUD campaigns, including invoking "the yellow peril" to management on one visit to my site when it became clear they were likely to lose out on a large (7 figure) sale.

Bearing in mind that they followed the microsoft model of taking over the market(*) it's no wonder that they're running scared of a whole crop of low priced makers using Broadcom or other commodity silicon - especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.

(*) Don't be perfect, just be good enough, and cheaper with no addon charges, then when you have dominance by taking market share away from the big players, buy out the small ones and shut them down, then jack the pricing up and introduce differential licensing

Re:Cheaper, too

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.

That's really the key point. Their own executives reportedly concluded that if they tried to move into the SDN space, they would turn their $43B business into a $21B business, yet they were publicly embarrassed when what was supposed to be a billion dollar deal with Amazon fell through. They are probably contemplating what happens when SDN and open devices are no longer the new kid on the block but an established, mature part of the industry. I don't suppose they much like the conclusions they must surely be reaching right now.

General Counsel's Blog

[HockeyPuck]

Cisco's General Counsel has a blog on the subject.

From another article:

Arista was founded by former Cisco employees, many of whom are named inventors on Cisco's networking patents. Among others, Arista's: 1) founders, 2) President and CEO, 3) Chief Development Officer, 4) Chief Technology Officer, 5) Senior Vice President for Customer Engineering, 6) Vice President of Business Alliances, 7) former Vice President for Global Operations and Marketing, 8) Vice President of Systems Engineering and Technology Marketing, 9) Vice President of Hardware Engineering, 10) Vice President of Software Engineering, and 11) Vice President of Manufacturing and Platform Engineering all were employed by Cisco prior to joining Arista. Moreover, four out of the seven members of Arista's Board of Directors were previously employed by Cisco.

Re:General Counsel's Blog

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to expect that a large percentage of the talent in the networking space worked at Cisco at one point. The very best of them probably had patents to their names... and at some point in their careers likely got frustrated, so moved on to do something else themselves...

Its not exactly a story without precedent...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Looks like Cisco's claiming copyright on an API

[davecb]

Cisco's past competitors have copied their CLI without objection from cisco. This may be a follow-on to the Oracle claim that the Java APIs are copyrightable...

Backdoors

[jenningsthecat]

I wonder if Arista also copied the 'ease of access' that Cisco provides to the NSA and others? Maybe that's patented too...

Cisco crying uncle

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Cisco can't compete in the marketplace or buy Arista (bad blood between Arista founders and Cisco brass - they were acquired by Cisco once in Cisco's Kealia acquisition. The seed that grew into Cisco's monster data center switch business), so Cisco has opted to drop their dignity and file unsavory lawsuits.

Their API claims are dubious, at best (DOS and PC clones anyone?). Their patents are the usual any software engineer in his right mind would think of this patents - they are defensive patents the big companies file to stave off patent trolls (seriously, look them up). If they can show documentation copying that would be about the only thing worth pursuing.

Given the broken American patent and copyright system and the self preservation obsessed federal circuit appeals court dealing with patents, this could be a drag for Arista but not because of any merit.

Re: Cisco crying uncle

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: Cisco acquired Granite Systems. Kealia came later, did something else and was acquired by Sun.

Re:Cisco crying uncle

[hey!]

Apparently Cisco can't compete in the marketplace or buy Arista (bad blood between Arista founders and Cisco brass

So then wouldn't it be Cisco that is brazen?

Re: Cisco crying uncle

[Anonymous Coward]

The first of the the packet inspection patents should never have been issued: obviousness. The second is a fucking piece of shit submarine continuation that looks to be the same as the first. If anyone could understand the database patent well enough to infringe it, they probably would have picked some simpler overall scheme; incomprehensible. Anyone who uses the term "etherchannel" in a CLI or believes that "exit" or level-modal CLI is a good idea deserves to be sued for cretinism, not for infringement.

Good artists copy, great artists steal

[Anonymous Coward]

Good artists copy, great artists steal. --Steve Jobs

And if the competition is doing something right, you do what they do. And if you do it as well at a better price, then you gain market share. Be happy they are calling themselves "Arista". They could have called themselves "SanFran"

Did Arista steal Cisco's NSA backdoor "feature" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Cisco is claiming that Arista stole its "intellectual properties" --- and one of those so-called "intellectual" property that Cisco has, that other doesn't have, is a backdoor for NSA

Did Arista steal that as well?

Does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

... for extensive copying of Cisco's ...

So have they copied the NSA's back-doors too?

Come on people

[Khashishi]

When I told you once, I told you a thousand times, and run Google translation by hand twice, and then run the grammar checker word.

If you copy a word for word, and then caught.

Pot, Meet Kettle.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hilarious. Anyone remember how Cisco got started?