Linksys/Cisco GPL Violations

[David Turner <novalis@fsf.org>]

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To Linux Developers Concerned about the Linksys/Cisco GPL Violations:

We are in ongoing negotiating with Linksys/Cisco about this issue.
Information from Andrew Miklas and others has been very helpful to us in
our negotiations, and we encourage others to share with us any technical
information about this or any other GPL violation.

This isn't the first GPL violation we have dealt with; we've been
actively
enforcing the GPL for over ten years.  Our usual practice is not to
publicly announce details of ongoing violation negotiations, because we
find that private negotiation yields quicker and better cooperation.
By building a relationship with violators where we are helping them to
come
into compliance, we avoid having to fight in court, and are able to
spend
less resources per violation.  Our number one goal in any GPL violation
case is to get proper and full compliance with the license; everything
else is secondary.

GPL violations sometimes take time to resolve.  We wish that we could
force resolution quicker, but we haven't found a way to do that.  We
have,
however, discovered a variant of Brooks's Law: adding more lawyers to a
GPL violation usually makes it take longer.  Lawyers are reluctant to
admit to mistakes, because they fear it could be used against them.
Engineers and product managers are typically interested in fixing
mistakes, so we try our best to work with them first before escalating
to
legal teams on both sides.  Such escalation has happened on this
violation, so it will take additional time to resolve the matter.

In addition, we are leading a coalition of many copyright holders in the
WRT54G, as Linux is only one part of a large body of GPL'ed software in
the product.  We formed this coalition because, having done enforcement
cases for a product with a broad range of copyright holders before, we
have found that separate enforcement actions and/or law suits from
individual copyright holders make attainment of compliance more
difficult.

We will continue to do everything necessary to obtain full compliance on
this and any other products where violations can be confirmed.  On this
particular violation, we will keep the community informed when issues
come
up that impact the rights of everyone whose work is being distributed by
Cisco or any of its subsidiaries.

If you are a copyright holder on software in the WRT54G, or any other
Cisco product, you are welcome join this coalition.  Please email
<license-violation@fsf.org> for details.

Sincerely,

David Turner, GPL Compliance Engineer, FSF
Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, FSF


-- 
-Dave Turner
GPL Compliance Engineer
Support my work: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=novalis&p=FSF

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