Should open source boycott Cisco’s AXP developer contest? That question is getting the open source development community all hot and bothered since it was posed by Dana Blankenhorn writing in ZDnet this week. “[H]ere is a company being accused of stealing open source code on the one hand trying to buy the loyalties of open source programmers with the other,” he writes, referring to the Free Software Foundation’s lawsuit against Cisco over copyright infringement. Cisco is running a competition branded “Think Inside the Box” in which it is giving away $100,000 in prizes for developers to build applications for its AXP Linux blade running inside its Integrated Services Router (ISR). Cisco recently extended the deadline for the first-phase of the competition from Jan. 12 to Feb. 27 due to what Cisco claims to be the high-level of international interest.
Blankhorn muses that perhaps the deadline has been extended because of a lack of entries.
He adds: “Companies are welcome to act as open source leeches if they wish, and if that behavior goes beyond the pale that’s what lawyers are for.” Cisco was the center of a debate last month over whether the networking giant is a open source leech or is poised to become an open source champion in the style of IBM.
Blankhorn asks: “Should open source people shun Cisco until it gets right by the FSF? Or do we compartmentalize legal disputes and get on with the work?”
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