It's been covered elsewhere including Slashdot, so you've probably heard it already. But FSF's (that's the Free Software Foundation not the Financial Stability Forum) copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco is actually two pieces of news – one, it's FSF's first suit (filed on its behalf by SFLC), and two it's against Cisco Systems, Inc.
Like many I sense a strong possibility that FSF will win -- one, because GPL has been tested in courts before, in the US and upheld elsewhere, and to understand the second reason you need to understand how FSF approaches (read: approached) such matters. FSF would rather work with you for compliance than drag you to court. The venerable Harald Welte, who started work on gpl-violations.org because of FSFs lets-sit-and-talk attitude explains this in his blog post.
It's funny how the historic cycle closes. Originally I started gpl-violations.org because I thought the FSF strategy was not aggressive/efficient enough in making Linksys/Cisco GPL compliant in the infamous WRT54G case five years ago. Now, it seems that even the tolerance and patience of the FSF has found an end.But this case could have far reaching ramifications. Like a user points out at /.
Imagine, for a moment, that various $BIG_COMPANIES decide they want to be able to use code from free software in their products without a fuss, while still keeping protection for their own code.
So, what they do is approach various national governments, WIPO, etc., and have copyright protection removed from source code.
The companies then sit back with the fact that their binary code is still copyright protected, and their source code is safely hidden under "trade secret" protections . . . but the source code of free software is neither copyrighted nor secret. So the companies can take the known, non-copyrighted source code from free software, and combine it with their secret source code to make their copyrighted binary blobs . . .
I'm not sure one lawsuit can bring about such a radical change in policy. But until we get to brighter economic pastures, I expect more GPL abuse and a lot more lawsuits.
