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,

[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]

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,

[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?

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

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: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.

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: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: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:When you copy even the typographical errors

[sexconker]

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