The Free Software Foundation filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit Thursday against Cisco Systems in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The FSF alleges Cisco violated its copyrights, including for GCC, binutils and the GNU C library, in various products distributed under the Linksys brand.
In doing so, the FSF said, Cisco denied its users their right to share and modify the software. Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003.
“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.”
Stalled Negotiations
Most of the programs named in the complaint are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The rest are under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Both encourage everyone to modify the software and share it with others — under certain conditions.
One of those conditions says anyone who redistributes the software must also provide the source code=. The FSF said it has documented many examples of Cisco distributing licensed software without providing the source code.
The FSF started working with Cisco in 2003 to help the company establish a process for complying with the software licenses, according to Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer for the FSF. Smith said the initial changes were very promising, but said Cisco never put in the effort necessary to finish the process.
“Five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance,” Smith said. “As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we…