The FSF 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." Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software as a result, the FSF adds.

FSF Licensing Compliance Engineer Brett Smith said the FSF in 2003 learned that the Linksys WRT54G wireless router used a GNU/Linux system in its firmware, "but customers weren't receiving all the source code they were entitled to under our licenses."

Smith adds that the FSF began working with Cisco in 2003 to help the company establish a process for complying with FSF's software licenses. It also emerged that other Cisco products were not in full compliance either, according to Smith, who described the FSF's five-year effort to get Cisco compliant as a "running game of Whack-a-Mole."

Cisco has refused to "notify customers about previous violations and inform them about how they can now obtain complete source code," Smith claims. "The FSF has put in too many hours helping the company fix the numerous mistakes it's made over the years. Cisco needs to take responsibility for its own license compliance," he adds.

The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the , which is providing representation to the FSF in this case. A copy of is available on the FSF Web site.