TheOpenAnalyst

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Cisco Systems doesn’t seem to know how to color inside the lines.
The networking-equipment giant has been foraging in a diverse set of new markets lately, taking on Microsoft in the collaboration and unified-communications markets, but now sticking a finger in the eye of longtime server partners Hewlett-Packard and IBM by jumping into the [...]

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Cisco Systems’ much-publicized push into the server business counts Red Hat among its supporters – a move that could offer another path for Red Hat’s software into corporate data centers.
Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), the San Jose tech giant, said Monday that plans to sell servers for data centers, the locations that house big companies’ [...]

I’ve written before that Cisco has aggressively been adopting open source for its hardware products, in addition to its push to promote Linux at Microsoft’s expense.
What’s particularly interesting (and frustrating) in Cisco’s adoption of open source, however, is its apparent efforts to benefit from open source without taking any responsibility for the included open source.
Cisco [...]

Networking and telecom hardware giant Cisco Systems is now squarely aiming its product line at the Asterisk PBX market segment and other open-source products, apparently ending a long-standing unspoken strategy of exclusive support for proprietary telecommunications systems.
Cisco officials now openly say support for standards used in open source communications software — such as the Session [...]

Most folks are focusing on Cisco Systems’ (CSCO) consumer electronics push this week. But I’m keeping one eye on the data center — where Cisco apparently is preparing to launch blade servers. If true, I wonder: How soon will Cisco speed dial Red Hat (RHT), MySQL, Novell (NOVL), SugarCRM and other open source application providers?
Sure, [...]

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 [...]

There’s a long standing argument over the differences between “open-source” software and “free” software. But, a more common error outside of software ideology circles is that you can use open-source software anyway you please. Nope. Wrong. It’s never been that way.
Cisco, the networking giant, should know better than this, but they’ve worn out the FSF’s [...]