May 19, 2009, 5:01 am
Last December, the Free Software Foundation, with great fanfare, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco Systems, Inc. The complaint alleged that certain of Cisco’s Linksys products contained code distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. The complaint further alleged that Cisco, by distributing the enumerated products containing GPL-licensed code, had engaged in the distribution of such code, but had failed to comply with the requirements of the GPL license by making the code available in source code form.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the FSF by attorneys for the Software Freedom Law Center. The SFLC is the “enforcement arm” of the FSF, a law firm formed for the specific purpose of providing legal services for open source developers seeking to enforce the provisions of open source licenses. Prof. Eben Moglen is the chairman and one of the directors of the firm…
