Cisco Slaps Arista Networks With Suit For "Brazen" Patent Infringement 96
alphadogg writes Cisco has filed two lawsuits against data center switch competitor Arista Networks for allegedly violating its intellectual property. One suit is for patent infringement, which charges Arista with violating 14 Cisco patents for 12 features in the Arista EOS operating system. The second suit is for extensive copying of Cisco's user manuals and command line structures, right down to the grammatical errors within them. "This is not an accident but a strategy," says a source familiar with the matter. "It was a deliberate, brazen and blatant intellectual property violation in order to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Arista's shortcutting to get to market and win share."
Come on people, (Score:5, Funny)
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, run the manuals through Google Translate twice and then run Word's grammar checks.
If you copy verbatim, you gonna get caught.
Re:Come on people, (Score:4, Interesting)
Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure? If you did this copying stuff at school, you'd be kicked out of the school. But in the real world, copying will get you bushels of green paper.
Re:Come on people, (Score:5, Insightful)
The objective of the copying and likely the patent infringement is so there would be no learning cure for their products. It would end up being a cheaper clone of Cisco that any Cisco certified admin would be comfortable on.
In short, they didn't really care about getting kicked out of school. They only wanted invited into the computer labs. Once in, it is easier to stay in.
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there would be no learning cure for their products.
I'm thinking that was maybe meant to be curve, but I haven't read the manual and maybe the cure is something someone would try to stop.
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I'm thinking you are correct. Good catch.
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Honestly they all do it. I've used Foundry (now Brocade) and the commands are essentially the same. Even the stupid things that Cisco does "for legacy reasons" (blecch!) are duplicated.
It looks like this company's failure was that they didn't rewrite their manuals. They probably c
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Cisco has a LOT of errors in their docs. I went through a training course recently that used Cisco-supplied books, and all four books were loaded with errors. We spent far too much time crossing-out and rewriting the bad sections given what the course cost (almost $4000) for me to be happy with it. But if someone ripped-off their training documentation verbatim there'd be ample proof they did so.
Canary traps. ;-)
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ob disc: I work at cisco (right now, at least).
yes, their docs suck. reason: they hire cut-rate 'writers' from india who can't write to save their lives. things are rushed here (like everywhere), there is no time or money for proofreading and experts don't do reviews (again, this is everywhere). the writers are left on their own, mostly, and they have tight schedules.
tl;dr: its all about money and cisco does not care about writers or manuals. I could find at least a typo on every other page, these days.
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Join in
Lower that slider.
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Also there are a few legit reasons for AC posting. I do it once in a while when I want to post about something and not let it be known who I am. For reasons that have to do with my job. I do not work with any top secret clearances or anything but sometimes it is better if I am not identified.
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an AC probably trolled him in a reply. Most of us get emails from DICE when someone replies to a submission we have made... AC or not. I'm guessing the AC pissed in Hairyfeet's cornflakes.
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Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure? If you did this copying stuff at school, you'd be kicked out of the school. But in the real world, copying will get you bushels of green paper.
much easier to gain market share if everyone that can already use Cisco kit can switch to your kit with zero training.
Cheaper, too (Score:2)
And, since Arista didn't have to pay anyone to actually write the manuals or develop the command syntax, they can charge less for their products.
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You might consider the possibility that if Arista did charge less for their devices -- maybe much less, if say they were promoting a different business model that wasn't based primarily on very high margins on hardware sales -- then one possible consequence might be that Cisco would be terrified that their goose that lays golden eggs was on its death bed.
Not that I'm in any way claiming that this hypothetical scenario does have anything to do with anything, you understand. It's just a possibility that you m
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Cisco's business model isn't centred on overpriced hardware - they'll drop to match everyone else if prodded about it. Noone ever pays list pricing and 90% discounts aren't unheard of.
Their model is in overpriced support contracts(which aren't discounted - ever), overpriced training courses, "noone ever got fired for buying Cisco" and extensive FUD campaigns, including invoking "the yellow peril" to management on one visit to my site when it became clear they were likely to lose out on a large (7 figure) sa
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especially when scratching below the surface reveals that Cisco is using the exact same silicon in a bunch of products and charging 3-5 times as much.
That's really the key point. Their own executives reportedly concluded that if they tried to move into the SDN space, they would turn their $43B business into a $21B business [businessinsider.com], yet they were publicly embarrassed when what was supposed to be a billion dollar deal with Amazon fell through. They are probably contemplating what happens when SDN and open devices are no longer the new kid on the block but an established, mature part of the industry. I don't suppose they much like the conclusions they must surely b
Re:Come on people, (Score:4)
There's a difference between copying the command syntax, which has been held as valid in some jurisdictions, and photocopying the manuals.
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Why couldn't they have written their own manual and command line structure?
Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors.
This would be like BSD authors suing Linux developers for copyright infringemenet, for copying the /etc/fstab file format.
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Re: Come on people, (Score:3)
The cruft that gets me is how each routing protocol has a completely different way to specify netmasks:
OSPF: network 10.10.10.0 0.0.0.255 area 0
BGP: network 10.10.10.0 mask 255.255.255.0
etc.
Would implementing a parser for "/24" be THAT hard?
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Not just routing protocols, but simple syntax
#ping vrf ABC123 8.8.8.8 /vrf ABC123
#telnet 8.8.8.8
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Right now I'm ACL hell, and different types of ACLs have just enough differences in formatting to enter them that I keep having to go back to the literature. Given that I'm working on teaching myself routing so I'm running lots of vlans on trunk interfaces this is becoming a headache with so many lists to ma
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The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. Much of it seems to have been acquired from outside, hacked down to a core functionality and them bolted on.
I presume they don't just re-write the parsing because it's all cut/pasted rather than well factored.
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"The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. "
It's a swiss army knife, only less well designed.
Sendmail is just as bad and for much the same reasons.
At some point you have to decide that all that complexity IS the problem (especially for security) and the best thing to do is start over.
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Actually, sendmail is more cohesive. Their error was making the config language a bizarre form of pattern matching amounting to a Turing complete (but bizarre) language.
IOS is LITERALLY bits and pieces bolted together with dabs of glue logic. Different parts have a different mask syntax because they were once separate pieces of software.
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Umm, except by default, you're in diagnostic mode. When you remote in, the system assumes that you're trying to check something. Configuring stuff is a high risk endeavour, so you need to explicitly choose to enter that mode.
It's akin to the i command in vim to enter insert mode to type text.
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Router#conf ?
confirm Confirm replacement of running-config with a new config file
memory Configure from NV memory
network Configure from a TFTP network host
overwrite-network Overwrite NV memory from TFTP network host
replace Replace the running-config with a new config file
revert Param
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Hell, that one has to type "configure terminal" when you're SSHed in to a switch and obviously trying to configure it from the terminal is silly.
Correct... but just as with other APIs; renaming the command is a breaking change. It doesn't matter whether it's a software program or a human interfacing with it, the command configure terminal has to place the device in configuration mode, if you want interoperability with templates and procedures that users developed to configure their network when the
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"Because the command line structure is an industry-standard software API/human interface to well-understood network device behaviors."
IOS command line structure was quite different to the old Bay and other equipment I cut my teeth on in the early 90s, but it's now ubiquitious - mainly because it's not byzantine.
Nonetheless, cisco HAVE sued competitors over similar command structures, which is one of the reasons that there are a few online translation pages between Huawei/cisco/hp commands which do identical
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cisco owns the cli (has for nearly 20 yrs now). its the industry standard cli, like it or not.
you HAVE to do the cli a-la cisco if you want in, in the networking biz.
everyone (other than jnpr) does it and for good reason.
now, copying the manual is a bit too much; but the cli is fair game and it was smart to use the cisco cli style.
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I find juniper's config mode and config file structure rather beautiful. As for their cli syntax, I don't actually see it as very different from cisco's.
if you want to clear arp cache, it makes sense that that's the actual command. no sane company would have "please make forgettings ...." or similar nonsense.
but anyway, did cisco really invent this cli syntax type? there's the Unix way of "command -x=1 -y=2 object" and there's the OpenVMS way of "command specifier anotherspecifier object". I don't think cis
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No, you don't HAVE to have it, it's Cisco's. Create your version. Things like UI and command line should have legal protection beyond the vanilla patent and copyright protections. We need new types of protections for each type of IP (command line for example).
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And what';s the deal with cars! Someone should patent the steering wheel, brake on the left, gas to the right. Let someone reverse the pedals and provide a tiller bar for steering. Someone can use steering levers. Won't that be FUN!!!??
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On the other hand, after this "procedure", you will need a tram of language forensics to discover the original meaning...
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From the sounds of it, that's what Cisco did, so of course Arista will have the same text.
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Ether they have been terminally stupid, or this is an artifact of using the same tool, e.g. the broken, but widely used "word".
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Word grammar checking is better than what most people post, unedited, on the web. In fact, it's better than copy produced by major news organizations and that's (in theory if not in practice) reviewed by professional human editors. And it's way better than the shitty grammar checking you get with LibreOffice, for instance.
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No, you just spewed some bullshit and got called out for being a dipshit.
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You wish....
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Not only is this not an "artifact" of using the same tool, it's not even an artefact of using the same tool.
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When you copy even the typographical errors you have a problem.
Yeah, at least they could create their own, like the Commodore 64 "kernal"...
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It's the one with 76 trombone players.
Oh, wait. That still doesn't narrow it down.
shortcutting to get to market and win share (Score:2)
You don't need a shortcut, if you're on windows. Just type //machine/share
net use
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That won't work.. I just tried it and got a message about a problem with my network. I doubt that is what a network hardware vendor is trying to accomplish.
Deja vu (Score:5, Interesting)
Huawei did the same thing when they launched their first routers.
Worse even. They just copied the Cisco IOS code replacing the string "Cisco Systems Inc" with "Huawei"
Cisco won in court because Huawei's routers had the exact same bugs and spelling mistakes in the IOS CLI.
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I love that these competitors make it so easy for network engineers to switch products. If only they fixed a few of the idiosyncratic IOS things that everyone can't stand they would easily have superior products.
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Nice. On the other hand, this is how technology gets cheaper and better, so maybe the problem is with IP protection times being far, far too long?
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Huawei copied the code. Arista just made the command line commands look the same (according to the article).
Can you copyright a CLI language? I'm not sure you can.
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>Can you copyright a CLI language?
According to the most recent development in the oracle/google lawsuits, you can. God help us all if that stands on appeal.
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Well, God help the US IT industry, anyway. Even with the dubious "diplomacy" the US employs when it comes to exporting intellectual property laws, I expect most of the world would see such an obvious and needless barrier to competition and interoperability for what it is. Prohibiting that kind of competition in the US would just be good for... well, everyone who develops software in another jurisdiction, basically, as long as those other jurisdictions don't propagate the mistake.
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(Seriously, how is that off-topic? It's a reasonable assessment of the current mood in places like Europe, and I personally know people who would be in exactly the position to benefit that I described if the US does stick with the legal position as it apparently stands today and so conveniently removes some of the competition that would otherwise exist for European firms.)
I get copying but... (Score:1)
why copy Cisco of all people?! I mean, ridiculous boot times, incomprehensible backend, and more recently, mediocre programming.
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please tell us what is, in your informed opinion, a "people" worthy of being copied. Juniper? Avaya? HP? Huawei? Some obscure russian brand?
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Most of those have cloned Cisco's IOS CLI and configuration structure, at least to some extent. Juniper's JUNOS was intentionally NOT written to clone IOS; instead they "invented" their own CLI and configuration structure from scratch. While it has its own warts, JUNOS is vastly superior to IOS ("commit confirm" FTW!).
General Counsel's Blog (Score:4, Informative)
Cisco's General Counsel has a blog [cisco.com] on the subject.
From another article [yahoo.com]:
Arista was founded by former Cisco employees, many of whom are named inventors on Cisco's networking patents. Among others, Arista's: 1) founders, 2) President and CEO, 3) Chief Development Officer, 4) Chief Technology Officer, 5) Senior Vice President for Customer Engineering, 6) Vice President of Business Alliances, 7) former Vice President for Global Operations and Marketing, 8) Vice President of Systems Engineering and Technology Marketing, 9) Vice President of Hardware Engineering, 10) Vice President of Software Engineering, and 11) Vice President of Manufacturing and Platform Engineering all were employed by Cisco prior to joining Arista. Moreover, four out of the seven members of Arista's Board of Directors were previously employed by Cisco.
Looks like Cisco's claiming copyright on an API (Score:2)
Backdoors (Score:2)
I wonder if Arista also copied the 'ease of access' that Cisco provides to the NSA and others? Maybe that's patented too...
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Apparently Cisco can't compete in the marketplace or buy Arista (bad blood between Arista founders and Cisco brass
So then wouldn't it be Cisco that is brazen [merriam-webster.com]?
Come on people (Score:2)
When I told you once, I told you a thousand times, and run Google translation by hand twice, and then run the grammar checker word.
If you copy a word for word, and then caught.