FSF - Credit: fsf.org

The FSF has sued Cisco for GPL-noncompliance.  Cisco has distributed binaries of GPL licensed programs, without the source code as well.

Most of these programs are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and the rest are under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Both these licenses encourage everyone, including companies like Cisco, to modify the software as they see fit and then share it with others, under certain conditions. One of those conditions says that anyone who redistributes the software must also provide their recipients with the source code to that program. The FSF has documented many instances where Cisco has distributed licensed software but failed to provide its customers with the corresponding source code.

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“We began working with Cisco in 2003 to help them establish a process for complying with our software licenses, and the initial changes were very promising,” explained Brett Smith, licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. “Unfortunately, they never put in the effort that was necessary to finish the process, and now five years later we have still not seen a plan for compliance. As a result, we believe that legal action is the best way to restore the rights we grant to all users of our software.”

I actually don’t see what the big deal is in not redistributing unmodified code.  Why can’t they just link back to it?  “Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software”…I’m pretty sure they can still download the source code to gcc and modify it if they want to.  I feel like this clause was designed for a world where few people have internet connections.

• FSF