The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has settled a GPL compliance lawsuit with network hardware maker Cisco. Under the terms of the settlement, Cisco will make a monetary donation to the FSF and appoint a Free Software Director to conduct continuous reviews of the company's license compliance practices.

The FSF filed a lawsuit against Cisco last year, alleging that Linksys—which is owned by Cisco—routinely failed to adhere to the requirements of GNU's General Public License (GPL), under which Linux and other open source software programs are distributed. The GPL stipulates that recipients of a software program must be permitted to study, modify, and redistribute the underlying source code. According to the FSF, Linksys often declined to provide source code upon request or failed to provide the complete source code of GPL-licensed programs that it integrated into its networking hardware products.

The FSF began communicating with Cisco about the issue in 2003 and helped the company understand its licensing obligations. At the time, Cisco acknowledged its mistakes and attempted to rectify the problem. Linksys continued, however, to fall short of the requirements defined by the GPL. When talks between the FSF and Cisco broke down in 2008, the FSF filed a GPL infringement lawsuit against the company.

Cisco is a major contributor to the kernel and has been investing in community outreach efforts around some of its Linux-based products. As a highly active member in the open source community, Cisco should have known better than to disregard GPL compliance concerns. The FSF lawsuit was an embarrassment for the company and also raised the possibility that Cisco could potentially have lost its right to distribute GPL-licensed software. As we predicted in our coverage of the lawsuit last year, Cisco decided to settle the matter swiftly out of court.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the FSF described the terms of the settlement and expressed satisfaction with the final outcome of the conflict.

"We are glad that Cisco has affirmed its commitment to the free software community by implementing additional measures within its compliance program and dedicating appropriate resources to them, further reassuring the users' freedoms under the GPL," said FSF executive director Peter Brown in a statement. "Our agreement results in making all of the relevant source code available in the fastest way possible."

This was the first time that the FSF has ever filed a lawsuit over GPL compliance failures relating to use of its own software. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), however, has filed a steady stream of lawsuits against embedded hardware vendors on behalf of the developers of the Busybox project. These lawsuits have consistently been settled out of court.

The FSF and the SFLC believe in nonconfrontational enforcement and only escalate to litigation in cases where vendors are unwilling to cooperate. The obligations associated with distributing GPL-licensed software are not especially onerous, so companies are generally inclined to take the necessary steps when they are properly educated and it becomes clear to them that there are consequences for failing to do so. The swift resolution of the FSF's lawsuit against Cisco demonstrates the efficacy of this approach to enforcement.

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