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 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