They are asking for profits because that is one of the legal remedies they are entitled to. It sounds pretty severe, like Cisco stands to lose a lot of money b

They are asking for profits because that is one of the legal remedies they are entitled to. It sounds pretty severe, like Cisco stands to lose a lot of money but I really doubt that the FSF would be awarded anything here. The defendant (Cisco) gets to deduct "the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work." (17 U.S.C. § 504 of the US Copyright Act). I imagine if you take the profit from a single revision of a firmware image and subtract everything that is not attributable to the Readline library (for example, named in the complaint) you can safely round that down to zero.