Here's a blog that does follow such court cases: http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/gpl-violations/ Here's a post from a few months ago: http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2006/10/30/ And a quote from that page: "But to get to the main point of this entry: The results we see from GPL enforcement. I don't want to write about the legal results, since they have always been successful, in 100+ violations that I've been dealing with so far." So, over 100 violations acted on and *every* legal result is successful. That's why companies roll over. The most recent legal result was D-Link. http://gpl-violations.org/ tracks them too, but there seems to be no activity since that D-Link verdict last September. Chris Josh Paetzel josh at tcbug.org Thu Feb 22 10:35:08 CST 2007 Because in the case of a computer you have access to the filesystems and binaries and can distribute them to other commodity devices. In the case of your microwave the only way to get the software off it is to remove the ROMs from the devices and use specialized hardware to get them off, and in the end you have a 'program' that will only run on their hardware. I'm not completely talking out my ass here yanno, I know several people that work in the embedded hardware industry and have investigated this pretty carefully. If this was an issue people wouldn't be doing it. If you think cisco is violating the law I'd like to see proof of it...such as a court case they've lost and had to pay out to someone. Or you can try and get a copy of the firmware in your microwave. More than willing to be proven wrong here.....