At the end of the day if a business (or whatever) buys a bit of Cisco gear, who is going to be making money? Chances are Cisco are in for a 'windfall' somewhere along the line whether it's a licence/feature upgrade, a module or WIC purchase or (now that the business has taken the Cisco plunge) they buy new gear from an actual Cisco re-seller with all the bells and whistles.Īnd lets be clear, I do not condone illegal file sharing of any kind but come on, lets elevate the thinking beyond the actual small print and live in the real world. The same goes for the 'un-official' re-sellers. I'll bet Cisco bank on getting more sales from 'on-boarding' Cisco acolytes than they would if they were seen to be harsh with people who, at the end of the day are likely to recommend and use MORE Cisco kit and not less. That little guy is going to pay for his CCNA (and maybe a CCNP) and chances are he'll be drinking at least some of the Cisco kool-aid for the rest of his networking life. I wonder what does harm and what does good from Cisco's perspective.ĭoes Cisco come down hard on the little guy trying to get his CCNA? Doubt it. There have been reports of compromised IOS images making the rounds. If the software images do come from anywhere other than the official Cisco software repository (including preinstalled on used gear) you really need to check the MD5 signature against the official Cisco version.

I don't know of any cases of Cisco taking legal action to enforce their intellectual property rights against a re-seller and I'd be very surprised if they took exception to someone using their software in a 'virtual' GNS3 environment. Of course there are dozens of Cisco re-sellers that sell used gear and those that do it the official Cisco way (sending the equipment back to Cisco for official re-licensing and charging again for the licensing) are obviously at a serious pricing disadvantage. I expect the automobile manufacturer's lawyer wasn't a software licensing specialist and used a lot of boiler plate text from somewhere else without actually realizing the real implications.

That said, I carefully reviewed the license for the software that makes my car work and it's not transferable either so in some cases buying a used car is just as illegal (technically - no court would ever entertain that you did something illegal with regard to software licensing in buying a used car). And they're available inexpensively or even free.īuying used gear is most often technically just as illegal as grabbing the images from some file sharing site because the licenses are not transferable.

There are a lot of switches, routers, and firewalls out there that, although not the latest, are still quite functional. If your goal is to run GNS3, then you need to get the IOS images in an appropriate way.īut, if you're trying to work with a lab setup, consider getting the actual physical gear.

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