Cisco has finally bowed to the demands of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and resolved that suit for copyright infringement that FSF filed in December over Cisco playing fast and loose with its GPL- and LGPL-protected code.

Cisco will pay FSF an unspecified amount for its sins and FSF will drop its suit, the first one it ever filed. For the last 15 years its enforcers have been able to persuade erring companies to come into line without going to court.

Cisco proved more obdurate.

See, FSF wanted Cisco to make all the license-protected Cisco-modified source code used in the firmware in its Linux-based Linksys routers generally available and Cisco didn't want to.

It felt what FSF called incomplete and outdated code made it "substantially in compliance."

Since Cisco hasn't been compliant since 2003 and since Linksys is a very popular gadget and since a dozen or so Linksys products as well as Cisco's Quick-VPN router software were involved and since Cisco resisted FSF's demands, the penalty it's paying could be tidy.

The suit had demanded the profits Cisco made off the Linksys widgetry and damages on top of that for treading on the FSF-copyrighted GNU C Library (GLibC), GNU Coreutils, GNU Readline, GNU Parted, GNU Wget (WGet), GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils and GNU Debugger (GDB), all stuff central to the Linux operating system.

The widgetry at issue embraced Linksys storage, telephone gateways, wireless routers, wireless media adapters, wireless modems and wireless phones.

As is usual in such cases, Cisco is going to appoint a "free software director" for its Linksys router subsidiary to see it complies with the licenses in the future. This watchdog will report back to FSF.

Cisco has also agreed to "take certain steps" to notify Linksys users of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, publish a licensing notice on the Linksys web site, provide additional notices in a separate publication and make the complete source code for FSF programs used available on its web site.