Here's a complimentary article from Bill Yeager's perspective: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1407787 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/st

Here's a complimentary article from Bill Yeager's perspective: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1407787 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1407787 > I asked Len why he wanted my source code, and he told me that facilities wanted to take over the router/EtherTIP’s development because I couldn’t dedicate myself to full-time support of the system I had invented and developed with help from Mike and Benjy over the past five years. This request seemed reasonable to me, so I gave him the access he requested and thanked him for his willingness to maintain and improve the software. I didn’t know that Len and Sandy Lerner had incorporated Cisco Systems a year earlier or that Len might have had an ulterior motive: to do a rewrite and then copyright the sources as Cisco Systems’ intellectual property. > I learned about Cisco a year later when I was called into Stanford’s legal department and told to bring a hard copy of my sources. Needless to say, I was a little nervous. Upon arrival, I was greeted by Stanford lawyer Iris Brest, who explained Cisco’s existence and Len, Sandy, and Kirk’s involvement. She then asked me to compare the Sumex-AIM sources with the EE sources that Kirk had written and tell her if I thought the work was derivative. Most of the EE sources could best have been described as plagiarized or paraphrased: variable names were changed, subroutines were renamed, and large data structures were broken into smaller ones, but identical parts abounded throughout the code. Kirk had added new features and removed others, but the “derivation” was obvious even to Iris who, from what I could tell, didn’t have a technical background. She thanked me, kept my sources, and sent me on my way. > Just to be clear, I didn’t object to the formation of Cisco Systems or its use of the code I had invented — in fact, I was pleased that work of which I was extremely proud could be used in this manner. However, I did object to the theft of intellectual property implicit in Cisco’s copyright on the sources.