Yesterday, the Free Software Foundation announced that it has settled its grievance with Cisco. After previously pegging Cisco as an open source leech, Cisco has positioned itself as an open source champion. The company agreed to appoint a director to ensure that its Linksys products comply with the terms of free software licenses, and in return the Free Software Foundation will dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit it filed in December.
When the FSF filed its suit, mouths gaped. It was the first time the FSF filed a lawsuit and it picked a target with deep pockets. The story goes that the FSF had been trying to pressure Cisco into complying with the GNU General Public License since 2003. Others said that taking on Cisco would only spell trouble for the open source community — scaring off other vendors who might want to adopt open source. Wrong. If Cisco was using Linux for its Linksys WRT54G routers under the GPL and then withholding some of its modified source code, as the FSF alleged, the network giant was in the wrong. This would not escape the knowledge of the open source community, even if a judge ruled in Cisco’s favor.
Wisely, Cisco didn’t go all the way down that road. In fact, the FSF states, that Cisco will not only appoint someone to monitor its compliance, but it will …
“notify previous recipients of Linksys products containing FSF programs of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website, and to provide additional notices in a separate publication. In addition, Cisco will continue to make the complete and corresponding source code for versions of FSF programs used with current Linksys products freely available on its website.”
On top of that, Cisco will also donate an undisclosed sum of money to the FSF. That’s game, set, match for the FSF and, oddly, for Cisco’s reputation, too.
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– Posted by Cisco Subnet editor Julie Bort.
