[andor]

I googled the 2003 Cisco vs. Huawei case as your post wasn't clear about the outcome. The WSJ article claims that Huawei admitted copying some software. I found this blog post:

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...

It's a Cisco reaction to the following statement by Huawei's chief US representative:

"Huawei provided our source code of our products to Cisco for review and the results were that there was not any infringement found and in the end Cisco withdrew the case ... the source code of the issues was actually from a 3rd party partner that was already available and open on the internet."

The blog post goes on to say that this is not a permissible statement and Huawei are misstating facts. Finally it provides some evidence for the copying, such as similar whitespace and comments in the source code. It also mentions the name of the "routine": STRCMP :-D. They should have run this post by an engineer before publishing...

Decide for yourself, but in my opinion there is quite limited value in a specific strcmp and likely they both copied it from the same free-software codebase.

[JamesBarney]

Does it seem more believable that when Cisco and Huawei had a dispute about what code was duplicated they picked an absurdly unqualified engineer or Cisco, one the world's largest router providers, has a highly optimized and specialized strcmp built out for their routers? The second seems way more believable to me than the first.