FSF sues Linksys - should they settle out of court?

[blueintray]

The Free Software Foundation is suing Linksys over their use of GPL licensed code without complying with the requirement to publish changes publicly.

There is talk that they may well settle out of court - http://preview.tinyurl.com/gplinksys - This made me wonder why they would do that? Surely, if you're in the right and you can prove it then it's better to make a test case that then defines the law for future cases, isn't it?

Should the FSF settle out of court or go for a legal precedent?

[eddie]

FSF as I understand it settles a lot of issues out of court. Maybe a router vendor will start selling routers without firmware (or just basic firmware for testing the unit and the ability to flash the unit with other firmware) so someone could choose their own flavor to install. It would be neat if you could get bare bones routers like bare bones pc's.....

[jstgtpaid]

Based solely on the article the FSF has tried for years to gain compliance from Cisco, the owners of linksys. It appears that Cisco wants to meet its obligations based on the statements they make. It also appears that Cisco wants and benefits from a healthy relationship with the open source community. Therefore, in light of that, I think they will settle out of court.

It appears that Cisco has made contributions to the open source community and the linux kernel. They have also paid coders in the community to meet Cisco objectives. So I would have to assume that they are not enemies of the community and one could even say they are friendly to the community. So I would say settle out of court. Save the beatings for the folks that deserve it. I am sure there are some out there...