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NetApp Hits Sun With Patent Infringement Lawsuit

Posted by samzenpus on from the don't-take-the-law-into-your-own-hands dept.

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.""

1 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Once again, the Patent Question to ask is... by miquels · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In 2000, Daniel Phillips started developing a new Linux filesystem that
    would have many of the features netapps WAFL has, and ZFS has now.

    This filesystem was called Tux2.

    He was quite sure that the patents NetApp had on this weren't valid,
    because of prior art, and because his algorithm was quite
    different and quite a bit smarter:

    http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.0/0 343.html

    Yet somewhere in 2002, he gave up on Tux2, presumably due to pressure
    from netapp: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/8/26/138 .

    I wonder what will happen to BTRFS in light of this new NetApp
    legal action: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/

    Mike.

    --
    Living is a horizontal fall