Protecode’s Mahshad Koohgoli on Software Intellectual Property and the Cisco Open Source Lawsuit
Recently, the The Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded by MIT alum Richard Stallman, has filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems for copyright infringement. The suit contends that Cisco distributed software originally written and distributed under the FSF’s General Public License (GLP), and has thus failed to fulfill the requirements of the GPL under which the software is published. The GLP terms oblige distributors to disclose that their products contain code licensed under the GPL and they must make that code available to any end user who requests to see it. As it happens, Linksys (now owned by Cisco) distributed various Linux-based products that rely on GPL-licensed components, but Linksys is said to have repeatedly failed to fulfill the GPL-specified obligations.
This is the first lawsuit that the FSF has ever filed for GPL infringement.
To explore the tangled matter of open source, intellectual property and the Cisco case, Your Truly just sat down and talked with Dr. Mahshad Koohgoli, CEO, of Protecode (www.protecode.com). Protecode has unique products that can examine a software developer’s project and automatically detect, log, identify and do pedigree-tagging of software content and report on associated intellectual property and licensing attributes and compliance against an organization’s policies, thus establishing intellectual property ownership and creating a software Bill of Materials (BoM).
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