Cisco’s violations no longer to be tolerated, FSF files a suit

San Jose-based technology giant Cisco is being sued by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the breach of the General Public License (GPL). The group of open source announced that it filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the network kit vendor in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In accordance with the group’s allegations “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”.

Among the programs whose licenses were violated by Cisco there are such applications as the GCC, binutils and GNU C Library. Thus Cisco denied the users the “right to share and modify the software.” FSF notes that the software is licensed under the GNU GPL or the GNU Lesser GPL. The group has been in talks with Cisco over the software compliance issue since 2003 when the company purchased Linksys for $500 million but talks were broken recently.

According to FSF licensing compliance engineer Brett Smith within five years Cisco failed to make any effort to finish the compliance process with no plan for its achievement developed so far. That was reason for FSF to start legal process. In this regard the group also noted that in their 15 years practice they have never taken a company to court over a copyright dispute.