Arista takes a round off Cisco in long-running legal battle

Good to see common sense applied...

... Cisco's competitors all have similar CLIs, presumably to make them easier to use if you're Cisco certified or have experience with their products.

H3C (now HP) network devices have some differences, like "display" instead of "show" and "vpn-instance" instead of "vrf" but the majority of commands are similar. A fair few of the other network hardware providers are a lot closer in terms of commands and syntax.

I don't see how you can sue on the structure of an API or a CLI, at the end of the day there's only a handful of ways to logically organise both and it's not exactly novel (APIs especially owe more of their structure to the recommended practices at the time they were designed and the objects they reference than any novel application of technology).

Can't speak for the rest of the Arista case and IANAL, but always saw this element of the case as hard for Cisco to justify or prove.

The hypocrisy with Cisco in this ENTIRE argument is that they did not even invent the syntax for their CLI. They "appropriated" it from DEC VMS, especially the SHOW commands. And many other vendors in the Mid 80's like Ungermann-Bass and Bridge Communications. They just did not "Invent" it... They took it and did not pay anyone for it..