FSF Settles with Cisco over Licensing

May 21, 2009

In December 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) filed a lawsuit against network giant Cisco, claiming that its subsidiary Linksys had multiple violations of the GPL. The two parties have now reached an agreement.

As part of the agreement, Cisco is appointing a Free Software Director for Linksys who will oversee Linksys' compliance with free software licenses, primarily the GNU General Public License. The director is to report periodically to the FSF about its compliance efforts.

Cisco also agreed to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website and in a separate publication, notify Linksys customers of their licensing rights under FSF guidelines, and provide free source code downloads of the parts of Linksys products affected by the licenses. Cisco is also to contribute monetarily to the FSF to promote their efforts.

Related content

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News