Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:14 AM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> OLPC is at risk of similar action unless it gets its act together.
> The project and its customers have skated by on GPL compliance,
> figuring that we're the good guys, and make halfhearted attempts every
> once in a while, so we won't get sued.  That didn't work for Cisco.
> Even a public *allegation* by FSF that OLPC is not compliant would
> have an effect similar to the "We're going Microsoft" debacle, further
> alienating the free software development community who OLPC depends
> deeply upon.  OLPC has, by distributing binaries under DRM, without
> source code, and with minimal notice, hung a sword over its head that
> just about anybody could unleash.
>
>        John

Some of us are new to one or another part of this issue, and need a
bit more background.

o Can you list the offending binaries and explain their faults?
o Can you explain how that puts us afoul of the GPL or any other
specific license?

Or are you just talking about PR effects if we claim to distribute
only Free Software, and somebody can say we ship something else in
addition, as happened with rms and tdr over the Marvell code on the
wireless chip and some other code in ROM?
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