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NetApp Hits Sun With Patent Infringement Lawsuit
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reports, "Network Appliance Inc. today announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking unspecified compensatory damages and an injunction that would prohibit Sun from developing or distributing products based on its ZFS file system technology. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin, Texas, charges that the Sun ZFS technology infringes on seven NetApp patents pertaining to data processing systems and related software.""
How does the patent in this case "promote the useful arts and sciences." Patents don't do anything to benefit the public. Patents were fine in an era before the need for capital became its own barrier to entry in a given market, but, any more, they are not only a relic, but a dangerous, anti-competitive one. Would it be a troll to say anyone who is in favor of patents is really in favor of oligarchy?
This is my sig.
This kind of thing should have been anticipated. Software patents are Evil. At least Linux won't be impacted.
The moral of the story is: "Always remember to mount a scratch monkey."
How you like that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Have a look at jcatcw's 100% accepted articles: Yet another ComputerWorld Whore shilling ComputerWorld trip on Slashdot. Does ComputerWorld have some sort of arrangement?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It would be a damn shame if development on it were halted because of silly patents.
The only thing that matters here is whether prior art can be forund for WAFL.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...appears on The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/05/netapp_sue s_sun_over_zfs/
This actually mentions the specific technologies NetApp is alleging are infringed, and contains a link to the actual complaint, which lists the details of NetApp's allegations.
Cursory reading suggests these are somewhat reasonable patents--they solve non-obvious critical issues in terms of having data synchronized across multiple images. We're not talking about "One-Click Ordering" here.
That said, they filed in East Texas, which is a notorious district for patent trolling, which doesn't help them appear on the side of the angels IMO.
I priced a 8.5 Terabyte NetApp dual filer 2050 with FC license vs. a 9TB Sun 6140 vs. a dual controller with an added snapshot license about a month ago, the 2050 was $118,000, the 6140 was $68,000. To make matters worse, the 6140 is a higher end 4GB FC throughout system, the 2050 really competes against the Sun 2140 which are both SAS internal and 4GB FC external. HP EVA 6100 is probably even less! (though I didn't price it)
Unless you're making a lot of little flexvols for a bunch of apps, or looking for an easy tiered solution, NetApp ain't worth it.
...it loses the chance to get an awesome FS.
/ zfs_linux.pdf
ZFS beats the hell out of EXT3:
http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris10
Thy time is truly past, fell troll. The dominion of men has come!
It sounds more like both Sun and NetApp are infringing on each others patents, and Sun simply wanted to formally resolve this in order to be on the safe side. This article seems awfully one-sided though, and the way the quote is paraphrased, it looks like the author is more interested in dragging Sun's name through the mud than presenting the facts.
I don't blame them, really. If you are a professionnal blogger (read former print journalist) the more traffic you can generate for your site, the more you make. Get it posted on /. or digg or wherever and watch the traffic flow.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I hope somehow that sanity prevails in the trial location. Network Applications Inc filed their case in Lufkin TX.
/ wtr_16280,300,p1.html?a=f
Lufkin is very long way from anywhere. I live in Dallas TX and Lufkin is a long 3hr 18m trip South and East from here. Yet Network Applications Inc is a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. Both Sun and Network Applications Inc are based in California.
Formerly the haven for patent pirates was Marshall TX. The same thing is probably going on in Lufkin TX.
Check out this article. "A Haven for Patent Pirates In one federal court in East Texas, plaintiffs have such an easy time winning patent-infringement lawsuits against big-tech companies that defendants often choose to settle rather than fight."
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software
May the company with the best case win,
Jim
"NetApp was further nettled when Sun took the file system open source."
I just started using ZFS in FreeBSD-CURRENT recently and have been quite impressed with it... Wonder how this will affect their inclusion of ZFS. (In case you want to try it, keep in mind that both the FreeBSD snapshot and ZFS on FreeBSD are experimental technologies, don't use them on production systems.)
...it loses the chance to get an awesome FS in the US.
I recall when early releases of ext3 appeared someone suggested NetApp might take issue with it due to IP. Daniel Phillips got rather heated about the matter. Apparently NetApp didn't pursue anyone over it.
At least Sun has the means to defend itself.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Here is the original complaint (PDF): http://www.netapp.com/go/ipsuit/spider-complaint.p df .
... the first commercial file system to use the copy-on-write tree of blocks approach to file system consistency." One of the first patents I filed at NetApp describes this "copy-on-write tree of blocks" technique in detail.
And here is NetApp's boss blog: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/ (quoted below):
This morning, NetApp filed an IP (intellectual property) lawsuit against Sun. It has two parts. The first is a "declaratory judgment", asking the court to decide whether we infringe a set of patents that Sun claims we do. The second says that Sun infringes several of our patents with its ZFS technology.
How did we get here?
Like many large technology companies, Sun has been using its patent portfolio as a profit center. About 18 months ago, Sun's lawyers contacted NetApp with a list of patents they say we infringe, and requested that we pay them lots of money. We responded in two ways. First, we closely examined their list of patents. Second, we identified the patents in our portfolio that we believe Sun infringes.
With respect to Sun's patent claims, our lawsuit explains that we do not infringe, and - in fact - that they are not even valid. As a result, we don't think we should be paying Sun millions of dollars.
On the flip side, our suit points out that Sun's ZFS appears to infringe several of NetApp's WAFL patents. It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights. Here's what creators of ZFS have to say: "The file system that has come closest to our design principles, other than ZFS itself, is WAFL
We filed suit against Sun because after we pointed out the WAFL patents, their lawyers stopped getting back to us. The first part of our suit is a declaratory judgment. It's complicated, but the basic idea is that Sun claims we infringe their patents, so we are requesting a trial to show that's not true. In essence, a declaratory judgment calls their bluff. It allows us to force a legal conclusion, rather than leaving this threat hanging over our heads. The second part is a complaint against Sun for infringing several WAFL patents with ZFS.
Many of the claims raised in the lawsuit are factually untrue. For example, it was NetApp who first approached Sun seeking to acquire the Sun patents NetApp is now attempting to invalidate. It is unfortunate that NetApp has now resorted to resolving its business issues in a legal jurisdiction (East Texas) long favored by 'patent trolls.'
Bottom line, Sun indemnifies its customers, and stands behind the innovations we deliver to the marketplace. Damn if that doesn't sound like Sun can back their claims up: For example, it was NetApp who first approached Sun seeking to acquire the Sun patents NetApp is now attempting to invalidate. Hmm, if that's true, Sun will have the docs proving it.
I kept considering implementing a WAFL-lite for Linux, but found the patents right away. Then along comes ZFS a few years later and it seemed like my problems were solved, someone else decided to take on the many patents around WAFL's good ideas. Saves me the lawyer fees that I cannot afford, although I would not have minded the publicity.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Again, from NetApp's boss blog: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/06/how_the_paten t_.html (I really like this guy, having read 2 articles):
Don't patents ever protect your good ideas?! In theory, they should, but in practice it doesn't usually work that way. Suppose your small company wants to protect its ideas against a big company. Filing suit will accelerate the cross-licensing negotiation, and you'll probably end up paying. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Patent battles between small companies work poorly because they are so expensive and take so long. Better to fight it out in the marketplace. Big companies suing small companies have a harder time than you'd imagine, because the courts recognize that an incorrect decision, especially against a startup, can cause irreversible damage. Courts are reluctant to impose injunctions, even if the patents really do apply. In the case of two big companies, both almost always violate each other's patents, so they end up cross licensing. (I'm not saying that patents never help to protect good ideas. If someone steals your patented idea, it's perfectly reasonable to go after them. I'm just saying that it seldom works out as well as you might hope.)
I know that some people are so frustrated with the patent system that they want nothing to do with it. The problem is, there's no good way to opt-out.
Patents are a mechanism for recouping an investment into research, which may or may not pay off. For example, prior to the successful invention, an inventor may have ten or hundreds of failures, each of which cost time and money. Inventors may have borrowed money to fund research, in which case the lender of the money will be expecting that money back (plus interest). It would be unfair to the inventor if he received ZERO reimbursement for a successful invention while others, such as manufacturers, simply plundered his work.
The current implementation of the patent system in the United States is definitely in need of an overhaul, but the idea of patents in general is still a good one. I would propose a system whereby an individual or corporation could apply for a certain number of patents per year at a certain fee. If the individual/corporation applies for more patents within the year, then the fee would increase for each extra application.
Not true. JFS and XFS most likely infringe on NetApp patents as well. And Hans Reiser killed his wife.
NetApp invented the snapshot, what a crock of shit. SCO, part 2 the revenge.
Yes, cross-licensing fees: your money plus access to your patent portfolio.
n t_.html
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/06/how_the_pate
BigCo wants your money, but also access to your patents, so the cross-licensing negotiation begins. You try to identify patents that cover their products, and they try to identify patents that cover yours. In the end, you balance how much of your revenue their patents cover, and how much of their revenue your patents cover. The little guy usually loses. Ironically, patents on your super-special technology often don't cover any of BigCo's products, so "miscellaneous" patents may be more important than the ones you thought were so valuable. BigCo has so many patents that it's hard to examine them all, so they will do a statistical analysis showing how many patents they have that might apply to you. Why not save the lawyers fees and just assume that some percentage does apply? (NetApp was in a cross-licensing negotiation with a large semiconductor company, and since we don't design or manufacture chips, we got them to remove those patents from their analysis.)
If it were all for the benefit of the public, the Plaintiff in this case would simply sit down and shut up. We would have never heard of the wonderful benefits of ZFS had everything (allegedly) stayed with this company I have never heard of. Instead of bitching and whining and patent trolling [cough]SCO[cough], they could work with Sun to better ZFS (if that's even possible) and let Sun sell the hell out of it.
But that won't happen. After all, trolling is all the rage these days.
The game.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I have a F760 fiber channel filer that was made back in 1999 running a WAFL (ontap 6.x now) OS. Funny how Sun didn't 'notice' the infringement until they made their own version of WAFL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS in 2005. Even funnier that the creators of ZFS claim that WAFL is the "closest" file system to their own. All we have to do is look at the dates here people. Netapp has been using WAFL for almost a decade in production systems. I'm no fan of Netapp because they want to charge for copies of software that I already bought years ago (corrupt disks) but I hope Sun eats a crow for trying to claim infringement on a system that has been in use for several years.
The filer is OLD!
Take this guy for example: narramissic. He shills for "itworld.com", another IDG property (besides ComputerWorld)
The truth is that ITWorld and ComputerWorld rarely have the best or even complete articles on whatever the subject is, they are simply vehicles to sell advertising.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Look for this to be settled with a Sun-Netapp merger. You heard it here first.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
...all those who haven't grasped the revolution inherent in ZFS yet.
The most compelling feature of ZFS is something that no storage appliance, RAID, or other self-contained subsystem can offer - end-to-end integrity.
Let's hope this doesn't chill Solaris 10 and ZFS adoption, because there's nothing else quite like it out there.
you had me at #!
Someone has the patent on the concept of managing 'something' with 'something'? In this case files with a filesystem? I'm really sick of patent trolls.
What the heck does NetApp's pricing have to do with anything remotely related to the article. This gets +2 Interesting? We out of Off-Topic?
I am sorry, but there is no such thing as a reasonable 'software' patent. No software should have ever been offered this protection.
Copyrights, are enough. And even copyrights don't need to be life + 70 years.
This is insane.
Patents really should be limited to things like the Cotton Gin, or steam engine thrust arms. And , I think the patent office should go back to demanding scale models of those things.
Ugh
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I am pulling for Sun on this matter. Innovation should always rule! Sun is a true innovator. ZFS is truly innovative. BTW, Storagetek has been around a lot longer than Netapp.
I saw my very first implementation of a snapshot-capable filesystem in a NetApp filer way back in summer of 1996. That was eleven years ago. I'd never seen anything like it before in my I.T. career. If NetApp didn't invent it, then who did? Sun sure didn't have anything like that in 1996, they only had the plain old UFS and LVM's from DiskSuite and Veritas.
NetApp has been around for a very loooooooong time. Almost as long as Sun. And NetApp did invent the snapshot filesystem more than 10 years before Sun even developed ZFS, which is truly a copycat of NetApp's WAFL and Sun's own developers even documented that it was a copycat. Sun's corporate brass threw the first stone here, as NetApp seemed quite content to just let their patents sit undisturbed and allow others to make similar snapshot filesystems come to exist as long as it was being done in the spirit of open source development and some money grubbing corporation wasn't going to step on their technology turf they hold in the big dollar commercial realm until their patents expired. But Sun did exactly just that, so actually Sun is playing the "SCO" part here by attempting to steal the fruits of someone else's hard work and claim it as their own.
NetApp saying that they are asking for declaratory judgment on patent claims Sun has made against them. I believe it: Sun likes leaving things, shall we say, legally ambiguous.
That's the whole point. If I invent a product, chances are, in order to really get it out, I will probably wind up infringing on someone else's patent in order to get a complete solution.
For example, let's say I have a revolutionary new programming language. Great stuff, but, ultimately, it will need a bunch of existing technologies to make it work. I'll need parse trees, string manipulations, code generation, and hey, why not an IDE, all of which are covered by a bazillion patents already.
So, if I bring my product to market, the best I can possibly hope for is a cross licensing agreement with a major player, and that in turn, means they can crush me. Or, they can work around my patent in some way, still get the feature, and crush me. Patents don't protect ideas, unless you have a lot of very good patent attorneys and those cost big bucks.
In the world of machines, this doesn't happen. If I invent a new kind of a screw, its pretty obvious that the screw is a patentable thing. But software doesn't exist at that level of componentry and most likely never will. It simply can't. Software wants to integrate and to some extent, that makes it unique from the physical world. You don't need to integrate a particular kind of screw into every single socket and with every single tool, but ultimately, with software, you do wind up having to talk to every kind of protocol, database, and GUI, and in doing so, you wind up flying into a hailstorm of patents.
Seriously, when's the last time anyone has actually checked to see if they infringe before they write something? Only a big company can really afford to do it. Face it, the idea of a little guy with a software patent is a myth, 95% of the time, and its simply not worth the cost to the rest of us - even if we work in a big corporation.
This is my sig.
Demanded cross-licensing fees? What does that even mean? Licensing fees perhaps, but it seems like Sun was after a cross-licensing agreement; not seeking to drag NetApp into court like some patent troll.
Well. Not sure of the timeline of events, but the open sourcing of a cross licensed thing is often directly at odds with what the cross license is envisioned to do: create a cartel.
C//
Development will continue outside of the US (and UK likely).
It's sad, but it seems that we are well on our way on moving the first world down to second.
Well, I can only say im sadened by both Sun and Netapp really. With any luck they'll both end up invalidating each other patents. I really hope that is the case.
ZFS is a nice fs (even if the linux implementation is going to be sadly lacking).
I hope they are trying to hit Sun at night.
http://www.wizy.org/mercurial/zfs-fuse/0.4.x?f=a7
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
NetApp says SUN's lawyers forced them into a corner and tried to extort license fees
SUN says that NetApp tried to force the patents from them first and they boo-booed them.
Ah... we might not know who did what first, but I'm definitely annoyed that the lawsuite between two CALIFORNIAN companies is filed in TEXAS court by NetApp... no prizes for guessing that that court is a haven for patent trolls, so I'm more inclined to believe Sun's story here.
- mritunjai
Ideas are cheap. Patents are not.
If he has no cash to build a prototype, how is he going to pay for a patent portfolio?
In the UK, it costs £200 to have a patent processed by the Patent Office, but there is an additional (approx) £3000 to have your patent drafted/checked by an agent against existing patents and translated into legalese. This £3000 is for each country that you want to apply for a patent. 20 countries, approx £60,000. Minimum. If you don't apply worldwide, the big guy, will simply take your patent and build and sell your product in the rest of the world.
Then, once you have your patent. The big guy sets his reverse engineering team on it, they find a slightly different way of doing the same job, and all your patents are useless. Go ahead, just try and sue that multi billion dollar organisation, see what happens to your house, job and family.
If you're a brilliant inventor with no money, you're pretty much fucked unless you can license your technology to a someone with deep pockets and who are reasonably honourable. Patents protect large organisations who can afford to roll them out worldwide... And patent lawyer's jobs.
They are not there for the small fry.
Deleted
Anyone who has studied filesystems in depth knows about NetApp's WAFL, that NetApp has defended its patents, and that ZFS uses a lot of ideas from WAFL. Questions about ZFS violating WAFL patents came up on LKML months ago, and probably earlier elsewhere. People have been wondering why Linux doesn't have anything like ZFS, and a large part of the answer to that is patents; The Tux2 filesystem would have been a lot like ZFS but was stopped due to patent grumblings. I wish Sun luck in overturning the patents, since that would help everyone, but this lawsuit should not come at a surprise to anyone.
Was she a patent troll?
vi +
This is a totally asinine statement. It promotes useful sciences by allowing Netapp to profit off of the hard work it put in to developing it's software. Yeah, I think this suit is kinda dumb, but patents are powerful tool of capitalism. Big corporations can't just copy what the little guy does and sell it cheaper, they have to buy or license his work, or try to compete.
However, Sun has not been willing to license their ZFS-related patents under anything other than the CDDL, which will prevent eventual inclusion in the kernel. As a FUSE filesystem it will probably never be adopted in a widespread manner (it would be a real pain to boot off of it I'd think). In theory the copyright issues can be circumvented by reimplementing the filesystem, but this won't get around the patent issues.
So, if the court in any way invalidates the various patents or weakens them, it improves the chances of mainstream kernel support for ZFS, or something that is more ZFS-like (depending on what aspects of ZFS are unencumbered).
So, this could have both positive and implications for linux. It would be nice to see a technology like ZFS incorporated in linux - a good percentage of my drive space is unused due to an inability to evenly map it across RAID-5 partitions in a way that won't harm disk access times (my drives aren't all of identical size, and I also have boot/swap/root partitions to squeeze in someplace that won't use RAID-5). With ZFS you don't worry about stuff like that and just allocate whatever space you want to allocate and the OS figures out how to best use it. Plus, the copy-on-write technology makes it a lot faster than RAID-5...
If the patents around WAFL/ZFS went away, a kernel-level ZFS/WAFL-like implementation would be possible without concerns over the patents. However, my suspicion is that the two parties would ultimately settle out-of-court before risking such a thing. If it went to court, they would be pretty confident that they wll either win, or at least prove unclean hands such that it mostly ends up still being even, but still allowing them to sue third parties. (BTW, IANAL)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"See, this is one of the things that's annoying about the term "intellectual property" -- it leads to people getting confused about what's what."
The only one's confused seem to be here. Another poster has already made the point about "fruit", but I'll re enforce it by pointing out those who do their research before posting their opinions on slashdot understand not only the distinctions between patents, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets. But the finer distinctions in each category. So rather than being lazy and complaining about the word. Put in the extra effort before each post.
"Patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are all very different things, and have very different rules that apply."
They also have some qualities in common, hence the "intellectual" part of the phrase.
"Patentium Obliviatae!"
At the blog of Sun's CEO Jonatan Schwartz, there is his version of the story. "Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun's patents and never filed complaints against NetApps or demanded anything".
"I wish Sun luck in overturning the patents, since that would help everyone, but this lawsuit should not come at a surprise to anyone."
Well no that would help Linux, and that's not "everyone". Second if companies like NetApp didn't do the R&D behind their patents? Then "everyone" wouldn't benefit either. Third wishing Sun luck, means that you've already decides the case and presumed guilt or innocence.
This could be corporate FUD, who knows. But if this is true, I wish Sun well in crushing Netapp.
[.snip-]
Thank You, Network Appliance
We held an investor and analyst conference today in New York City. All in all, a very positive day, lots of momentum and enthusiasm for where we're headed (and apprecation for the progress we've made - new product launches, and all).
In one of my first investor calls after the event, a large shareholder surprised me though, with, "why do you think NetApps is trying to kill off ZFS?" Er... what? I was totally stunned - it was the first I'd heard that Network Appliance was suing Sun.
My first response was that NetApps probably needs to read this post carefully - talking about the futility of litigation as a mechanism for proprietary companies to stifle the rise of open source competition.
Now having had a chance to read some of the statements their CEO made, here are some updates.
First, Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun's patents and never filed complaints against NetApps or demanded anything. ]
NetApps first approached StorageTek behind the cover of a third party intermediary (yes, it sounds weird, doesn't it?) seeking to purchase STK patents. After Sun acquired STK, we were not willing to sell the patents, We've always been willing to license them. But instead of engaging in licensing discussions, NetApp decided to file a suit to invalidate them. To be clear, we never filed a complaint or threatened to do so, nor did anyone, to the best of my knowledge, in the ZFS community.
We're all focused on innovation and winning customers, not litigation.
Second, a word on patents - we use our patent portfolio to protect communities, and indemnify customers - you need only look back to our settlement with Kodak when they attacked the Java community. (That case was heard in Rochester, New York, Kodak's home town, which is a tad different than the East Texas venue Net App appears to have chosen.)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly (again, read here for why), I'd like to thank our friends at NetApps for ensuring every single customer in their installed base is aware of the outstanding economics offered by ZFS as a file system and storage virtualization platform. Please feel free to (learn more here) and get a free trial Thumper storage device here. At $1.50 per gigabyte - open source storage is about a third the price of competitive offerings, with better performance.
And Sun indemnifies its customers, so I'd encourage all interested parties to compare the economics of ZFS and Thumper to what you're currently forced to pay - the savings are absolutely shocking.
The rise of the open source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors. I guess not everyone's learned that lesson.
Posted on 05:00AM Sep 06, 2007
Website Hosting
"I wonder what sort of person modded you down."
The type of person that is tired of reading the same thing over and over again
oligopoly
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Why are patent cases always filed in Texas? Is it just because everyone is headquartered there, or do they have more pro-patent laws than other states?
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trol ling
Sun's reply, from the article in The Register:
So the summary so far is the following:
NetApp: Sun is a patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond.
Sun: NetApp is the real patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond. Also, they are stinking liars.
At least one of these companies must be lying, so I'd expect the list of claims to be augmented with a defamation claim of some kind, by one or both parties.
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trol ling
so you can use ZFS's capabilities.
Imagine suing an open source project over patents & getting such limited bad karma on slashdot. Someone discovered all you have to do is claim they struck first even when all available evidence points to you being the patent troll.
Perhaps it's because of Sun's refusal to play nice with GPL. One of the reasons they picked the CDDL for ZFS was precisely because it's incompatible with GPL & they're afraid of linux. Of the two I suppose Sun is more likely to give a patent license for kernel implementation, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It's time to boycott NetApp products
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
DISCLAIMER: I work for sun.. Know nothing about the cat fight though
Sun: First, Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun's patents and never filed complaints against NetApps or demanded anything. ... The rise of the open source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors.
NetApps first approached StorageTek behind the cover of a third party intermediary (yes, it sounds weird, doesn't it?) seeking to purchase STK patents. After Sun acquired STK, we were not willing to sell the patents, We've always been willing to license them. But instead of engaging in licensing discussions, NetApp decided to file a suit to invalidate them.
NetApp: In January 2006, Sun renewed the discussions with NetApp, represented that it had
"inherited StorageTek's disk virtualization patent portfolio," and continued to assert that
NetApp infringes patents within this portfolio. These discussions continued into 2007,
and at no time did Sun withdraw the accusation that NetApp infringes the `639, `667, and
`185 patents.
Sun guy contradicts himself. "Never demanded anything" and "always been willing to license" do not fit together. Licensing means demanding fee. NetApp says they do not use technology covered in Sun patents, still Sun is "always willing to license" it.
NetApp's words are from "establishing controversy" part of the claim. There are also more dates and email cited in the PDF. If NetApp is lying, then no actual controversy exists between the parties and non-infrigment claims should be dismissed I guess. That's why I think they are true. Anyway, we'll see. Current Sun's words are just slogans mostly. Let's see what they'll say in response to the court.
In general the open source movement tries to stay out of patent fights. While open source can safely ignore the patent wars among proprietary software we have to defend open soure code from software patent attacks. NetApp's complaint against Sun seems to be a mixture of claims against both Sun's proprietary and Sun's open source programs. In NetApp's complaint they state that OpenSolaris infringes on NetApp's patent 5,819,292. I think that on that one claim the open source movement should help Sun fight against NetApp's claim.
Is there any way that NetApp can constrict their fight with Sun to proprietary code only? Would NetApp be willing to make the proper legal moves to where they are not asserting their patents against any open source code? By doing so NetApp could avoid a potential fight with the open source community.
------------------
Steve Stites
http://philsalin.com/patents.html
There! Read that and rub it on those corrupt gov's faces.
Er, wait a minute. Sun released the code under an open source license; that's not the same as releasing into the public domain. For a company litigating an IP dispute with Sun, NetApp's representative sure has a way of bungling something so basic as the distinction between "public domain" and "copyrighted but released under an open source license."
At least one of creators of ZFS were formerly interns at Netapp in the WAFL group with free access to WAFL source code. See: http://blogs.sun.com/ahrens/
If what you develop is actually a breakthrough it will be difficult to copy. If you can't make money given your initial advantage in the market, though, it should not be the business of governments to prop up people with lousy marketing skills, no matter how innovative they are.
If what you "invent" is a trivial improvement then you deserve to be copied to death.
I want society to benefit, society benefits by fast incremental advancements in technology, not by fat cats with deep pockets trolling the patent system.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A few months ago before GPLv3 was finalized Sun was willing to release OpenSolaris (which includes ZFS) under GPLv3. Sun liked those prototypes of GPLv3. I don't remember exactly why Sun liked GPLv3 prototypes but IIRC it was especially the patent-related excerpts which the CDDL has, too. Now that GPLv3 is released I don't know what the plans are either.
Some parts of ZFS are released under GPLv2 due to being included in GRUB.I suggest FreeBSD instead. Unlike (Open)Solaris it comes with loads of software, good hardware support, and good Linux compatibility. Their ZFS implementation is almost fully complete, and ofcourse it is compatible with OpenSolaris its ZFS. NetBSD recently released RC1 of their 4.0 tree, and they're also on porting ZFS to NetBSD via Google SoC. MacOSX I don't know about, seems Apple cares for snapshots feature and will deliver read-only in Leopard. FUSE (on Linux) is slower and incomplete, but compatible and has the advantage its userland hence not crashing your whole system if ZFS fails. Alternatively, simply use JBOD if your drives aren't all same size. With proper backups you'll be fine.
WE DON'T NEED NO BLOG CONTROL.
Agreed that there is some potential for ZFS under GPL3, but that isn't reality yet. And neither is linux under GPL3 so we'll have to see. Having both Solaris and Linux under GPL3 would be nice - both projects could improve using code from the other, and competition suits me as a user just fine. :)
I'm not really willing to switch to BSD - support for linux is better just about everywhere, and even FUSE would be less of a traumatic change - especially if it is made to work seamlessly.
As far as JBOD goes - it really isn't an option. I have the better part of a TB of data - mostly myth video/etc. The important stuff (documents, banking records, configuration, etc) gets backed up to other media and is offsite most of the time, but I can really only handle a few GB this way and only about once a week. The remaining data isn't super-critical, but I don't want to lose it all if one of my 6 hard drives fails (not to mention downtime).
ZFS would be a better solution than RAID and would be far less expensive than JBOD and a backup solution sufficient to protect this much data continuously.
Keep in mind the I in raid is inexpensive. There are plenty of alternatives to RAID, but they tend to not be inexpensive.