TheOpenAnalyst » Cisco Systems

Cisco declares war, embraces open source

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:10:00 +0000

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 server market, as The New York Times reports.

Is Cisco reckless, or simply smart?

Cisco declares war, embraces open source | The Open Road – CNET News

Red Hat joins Cisco’s server push

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

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’ computer systems. Cisco’s move into servers is in contrast with the company’s traditional business of selling the routers and switches that direct Internet traffic.

Red Hat joins Cisco’s server push – Triangle Business Journal:

Cisco wants it both ways with open source

TheOpenAnalyst — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:07:00 +0000

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 wants it both ways with open source | The Open Road – CNET News

Cisco Opens Up To Open Source

TheOpenAnalyst — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:45:39 +0000

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 Initiation Protocol (SIP) — is a good business strategy for the company

Cisco Opens Up To Open Source

Cisco Serving Up Open Source?

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:40:00 +0000

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, Cisco already has relationships with a range of software companies. But pushing into the fast-growing blade server market will force Cisco to strengthen partnerships with operating system vendors, application providers, middleware developers and so on.

Cisco Serving Up Open Source? | Seeking Alpha

Protecode’s Mahshad Koohgoli on Software Intellectual Property and the Cisco Open Source Lawsuit

TheOpenAnalyst — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:28:00 +0000

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).

Protecode’s Mahshad Koohgoli on Software Intellectual Property and the Cisco Open Source Lawsuit | TMCnet.com

Open source isn’t free software

TheOpenAnalyst — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:28:00 +0000

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 (Free Software Foundation) patience. So, Cisco is now being sued by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) on behalf of the FSF for Linux and other GPL copyright violations.

Open source isn’t free software | Computerworld Blogs