For GSM, this is not the case -- handsets do not authenticate the towers they're connecting to. It's trivial to become the loudest tower and get the phone to switch over to you... but there are technical hurdles around connecting back to the wireless carriers and getting calls / SMS to work correctly in both directions.

It's more than changing the cipher type, it's also negotiating up from anonymous client to verified client. The second situation occurs ALL THE TIME in web services that require different levels of trust for different content within the same site. So it's not a "seldom-used" feature in the least.

Do you really think the average user is going to notice a lack of green bar? Internet Explorer is going to accept this certificate as valid for https://www.paypal.com/ and there will be no hints to the user that it's actually illegitimate. Unless there's some other mechanism in Internet Explorer that will notice it got an EV cert in the past and is no longer getting it, then this cert is entirely usable for a man in the middle.

Cisco's moving towards Linux. That post is 2 years old, and they've not announced anything hinting that anything BSD will be coming out. I have a feeling they're willing to deal with the GPL (Linux) just so they don't have to adopt BSD years after Juniper did, which could be a little embarassing.

"IOS" has been rewritten and released half a dozen times, as NX-OS (which is Linux based), IOS-XR, IOS-XE (also Linux based), Modular IOS, and another major one in the pipeline. They all offer the same basic CLI interface that CCNA holders would be familiar with and instantly able to use.

They're only releasing source code related to the Linksys products, which were in violation. Cisco acquired Linksys a few years ago -- Linksys still operates mostly as their own company. Cisco proper already has people responsible for ensuring source license compliance and they seem to have done a good job. I don't think there's any GPL code in IOS, which is what it sounds like you're worried about. There's lots of BSD-style code though.