["Christopher K. St. John" <cks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, ddutt@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>  > I suspect that there is some confusion of ideas here.
>  > 
>  > (Preface:  this is not legal advice.  If you want legal advice, hire a
>  > lawyer.)
> This is the primary reason why I think that in the end, rather than debate
> legal battles, if we can agree that modifying the license for the plugins is
> OK, we can all get back to doing actual work. 
>

 Modifying the licence makes your life easier, but other people's
life considerably harder. Besides the issues surrounding contacting
all the contributors about the license change, there's also the
implicit threat that Cisco considers the existing plugins to be
a violation of their patent. Thats the only way it makes sense, right?
Either writing a plugin for a Cisco protocol is a controlled use of
the patent, or it's not. If it's not, then Cisco's request doesn't
make sense. If it is, then changing the licence is an admission that
only Cisco (and Cisco patent licensees) are allowed to write protocol
analyzers for Cisco protocols.