Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community.

When Red Hat kicks off its big customer summit June 18 in Boston, the open source giant will bring along a rather large — and surprising — date: Cisco Systems Inc. Why does Cisco plan to hang out at one of the open source industry’s largest events? The VAR Guy has a few hunches.

In 2007 Red Hat stood on top of the Linux kernel contributor list with room to spare. At 12.7 percent of the Linux kernel contributed by Red Hat. In 2009, things get more interesting, with Intel making a serious challenge to claim the top spot in Linux kernel contributions.

Cisco officials now openly say support for standards used in open source communications software — such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) — is a good business strategy for the company.

The Free Software Foundation and Cisco have now settled the litigation over the GPL and Cisco's subsidiary, Linksys.

When Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) and Juniper first said they were opening their router OSes, I thought that they'd be about as open as the iPhone. With Cisco's launch of IOS XE, I realize I was wrong: The iPhone is much more open.

Cisco has announced it has completed its acquisition of Norwegian video systems maker Tandberg and is launching a compulsory bid for the outstanding 8.9% shares it does not yet own.

At the heart of Cisco's new SMB products is a different approach and a different operating system than that which it has traditionally delivered to big enterprise customers. As opposed to Cisco's own IOS operating system, the open source Linux operating system is the mainstay in the new SMB products

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF's complaint alleges that in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library.