Cliff Saran
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed a copyright
infringement lawsuit against Cisco alleging that various products
have violated the licenses of programs on which the FSF holds
copyright.
The FSF claims that Cisco's LinkSys brand of network products
include FSF programs such as GCC, binutils, and the GNU C
Library.
The FSF said most of these programs are licensed under the
GNU General Public License
(GPL), and the rest are under the GNU Lesser General Public
License (LGPL). Both these licenses encourage everyone, including
companies like Cisco, to modify the software as they see fit and
then share it with others, under certain conditions. One of those
conditions says that anyone who redistributes the software must
also provide their recipients with the source code to that
program.
"Our licenses are designed to ensure that everyone who uses the
software can change it," said Richard Stallman, president and
founder of the FSF. "In order to exercise that right, people need
the source code, and that's why our licenses require distributors
to provide it. We are enforcing our licenses to protect the rights
that everyone should have with all software: to use it, share it,
and modify it as they see fit."
The complaint was filed in United States District Court for the
Southern District of New York by the Software Freedom Law Center,
which is representing the FSF.