Cisco and the Free Software Foundation settle compliance suit

Once upon a time, Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation started a conversation with Cisco about playing nicely with other people's software licenses. Five years later, that conversation hadn't gotten much traction, so the FSF applied lawyers to the problem. Five months later, Cisco appears to have gotten the message.

Cisco and the FSF made official this week what had been whispered in certain circles earlier in the month: There will be peace in our time, as Cisco revamps how it works with free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License.

The excitement centers on Linksys, Cisco's home-networking subsidiary, and on how licensing arrangements have been handled (and will be in the future). Cisco is known to be generally well-disposed to the free software movement; however, when it picked up Linksys in 2003, it acquired that firm's more cavalier behavior toward compliance. (The Linksys WRT54G router, the original version of which was released late in 2002, is Linux-based and uses multiple pieces of GPL-covered code.)

The suit, filed in December in New York's Southern District Court, alleged GPL violations relating to 12 Linksys products, mostly routers. Under the terms of the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), programs that use software developed under the LGPL have to distribute a copy of the source code along with the product, so the recipient can also modify the code as s/he sees fit. Linksys did not.

Cisco will, according to the FSF, appoint a Free Software Director at Linksys, who will supervise how those software licenses are handled. That person will stay in touch with the FSF to monitor compliance. Additionally, Cisco will work to tell previous Linksys buyers about their rights under the GPL and other licenses, publish an assortment of licensing-related notices on the Linksys site and elsewhere, and put the relevant source code on its Web site for all to see and use.

Cisco will also make a donation to the FSF.

It's a David and Goliath-sized story, and some observers were hoping that it would go to court and yield a result that strengthened the GPL's hand overall. James Grimmelmann, associate professor of intellectual property and Internet law at the New York Law School, said in an interview last year in SDTimes, "As a law professor, I hope it gets litigated and yields a court opinion, but as a computer user, I hope there's a settlement."

Writing on the FSF blog, FSF compliance engineer Brett Smith explains that it was never about the money. "When [a] violator admits that there's been a mistake and demonstrates they want to fix it, we take it as a sign that we can cooperative productively, instead of an opportunity to pounce.... [W]e're not out to wreck businesses or make lots of money. We just want compliance."

Betanews has asked Cisco for a comment on the settlement, and has not received a reply.