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[roseway]

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Thursday, December 11, 2008 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF's complaint alleges that in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software."

http://www.fsf.org/news/2008-12-cisco-suit

[kitz]

Interesting development.

Wonder if that will have effect on Thompson, as they also have changed their firmware of late.. and effectively blocked access to certain information within the shell and access to the shell commands. 

I believe Voyager got 'caught out' by this several years ago too and had to make their source available too.
One of the things that techies like is having acess to certain information and its why certain routers will become popular in a certain sector.
I certainly liked my Voyager router because of shell access - and stability of the broadcom chipset.

[Yorkie]

I may be wrong but didn't Microsoft have a similiar problem a few years back, I  may have to go and do some googling, this is not getting the sunday dinner cooked.

[roseway]

I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but Microsoft often claim that the free software world violates its patents. The truth is very much the opposite.

[sevenlayermuddle]

quote author=kitz link=topic=3784.msg90924#msg90924 date=1229179872]
I believe Voyager got 'caught out' by this several years ago too and had to make their source available too.
One of the things that techies like is having acess to certain information and its why certain routers will become popular in a certain sector.
I certainly liked my Voyager router because of shell access - and stability of the broadcom chipset.
[/quote]

I've already downloaded the source code package for the DG834GT, a 53MByte zip.  It seems to come complete with a build.sh and  README telling me exactly how to generate my own .img file, suitable for installation just like a normal firmware 'upgrade',  once I've made any changes to the source.   Reallistically, I'm unlikely ever to get around to playing with it, but I guess the 'DG Team firmwares' are evidence of just how much can be done.

[kitz]

ahhh... that takes me back to the days of 'Computing Platforms' module which shall I say opened my eyes to a few things.

What cant be denied is that M$ are very good at taking an idea and marketing it to millions.

Or maybe all my assignments must have been biased by whomever set them - cause what ever I researched - someone else/other company had been there done it first.
The amount of paralells was unbelievable... and the list was 'a hell of a lot'

M$'s advantage is they try to make it idiot proof - although with vista I feel they may have taken some things too far.

[kitz]

>> but I guess the 'DG Team firmwares' are evidence of just how much can be done.

Indeed.

... and hence why I'm surprised that Thomson have been able to 'lock down' their firmwares..  I suppose no-one was too much bothered whilst you could still have access to some of the inner workings using debug mode.
But unless Ive missed something, I'm not sure if the latest versions of the firmware should be so b@stardised so that even root access cant get certain info that should be available.

[roseway]

Without access to the source code for Thomson routers, it's difficult to know if they are actually violating the licences of original open source software, but it seems likely to me.

[roseway]

More explanation about the Cisco case

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/

[kitz]

Thanks for that linky eric.

When at first the mention of cisco, I think a few people may have assumed it was the/all 'cisco routers' not realising that in this particular case it meant the Linksys WRT54G