Monday, January 22, 2007

Cisco Works to Fix Overlooked GPL Requirement in iPhones

Via NetworkWorld -

Cisco is working on fixing one problem in the WIP300 iPhone model, John Earnhardt, senior manager of global media operations for Cisco, wrote on Cisco's news blog on Saturday.

He said that Cisco has also investigated other issues that an open source software researcher raised, but has verified that the phone complies with its licensing agreement except for the one issue.


Last week, Armijn Hemel, an open source enthusiast and consultant with Loohuis Consulting, revealed that he'd reverse engineered Cisco's iPhone WIP300 and found that Cisco hasn't properly shared code used in the phone. The phone runs Linux and Cisco licensed the operating system under the GNU General Public License (GPL), requiring it to share the source code for changes to the operating system that it distributes.

Hemel spoke with Cisco in October, alerting the company to the omissions, he said. He first began publicly talking about the licensing violation last week.

When he first talked to Cisco, he didn't identify the exact code that hadn't been shared but late last week he sent the networking giant a technical report pointing out the relevant code, he said during a phone interview on Monday. He contends that the phone has more than one issue and that he will watch for updates from Cisco. The company hasn't yet posted any changes or additions to the code it has already shared, he said.

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