Sun CEO Says NetApp Lied in Fear of Open Source

Lucas123 writes "In reaction to NetApp's patent infringement lawsuit against Sun, CEO Jonathan Schwartz today said in his blog that NetApp basically lied in its legal filing when it said Sun asked them for licensing fees for use of their ZFS file system technology. In a separate statement, Sun said NetApp's lawsuit is about fear over open-source ZFS technology as a competitive threat. 'The rise of the open-source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors. I guess not everyone's learned that lesson'."

Comments

Re:Sun really supports FOSS,,,

[AKAImBatman]

[Sun has] banned [Java]'s use in any and all internal projects

Typical urban legend. Propagated by a Slashdot troll no less. With Sun pushing up and coming Java projects like Looking Glass, Darkstar, Glassfish, and many others, one would think that people would have figured it out by now. But apparently not.

The real story is that after the introduction of Java, Sun started creating new Solaris components in Java. Unfortunately, they found out at the time that Java wasn't mature enough for what they were doing. So a ban was supposedly implemented on any new Solaris components being written in Java. Which (if the story is even true in the first place) was probably a wise move. I don't know if anyone remembers CDE around here, but having to launch Java just to change the volume was not a good design decision. Sun needed to either make the entire Desktop in Java (in which case most of the performance problems would disappear and the memory hit would be marginalized) or go back to using native components for all the widgets. The idea of a hybrid Desktop just wasn't going to cut it.

As it happens, Sun chose to assist the GNOME project and made that their primary desktop. Then they rebranded it as the "Java Desktop System" in one of the most confusing brand changes in history. And that is where we sit today.

<paul-harvey>And now you know... the rest of the story. Good day!</paul-harvey>

Re:Of course Schwartz would say that.

[varmittang]

According to the wiki entry on ZFS, its under the CDDL. CDDL is based on the Mozilla Public License and on the CDDL wiki is states, "Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. The Free Software Foundation considers it a free license incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). In fact, this is too generalized. Some restrictions in the GPL prevent GPLd code to appear inside CDDLd projects." So it sounds like the CDDL can go into GPLd projects, but not the other way around. But again, these are wiki entries, take them with a grain of salt.

See what Dave Hitz has to say

[abalacha]

Have a look at http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/litigoperatio n-.html before jumping into any conclusions.

Re:Ironic-- if true-- given NetApp's FOSS foundati

[Anonymous Coward]

The new data ONTAP GX is based on FreeBSD.
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/04/index.html

Re:Of course Schwartz would say that.

[akzeac]

So it's incompatible with the GPL, not really 'free software'?

GPL-compatibility is not a requirement for free software.

Re:Sun really supports FOSS,,,

[mAIsE]

Here is an interesting link...

http://www.netapp.com/go/Sun%20Lawyer%20Email.pdf

Re:Of course Schwartz would say that.

[mhall119]

ZFS is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, which is derived from the Mozilla Public License and is OSI approved, but is not GPL-compatible. A lot of "free software" isn't GPL-compatible, but that doesn't make it any less free. A user-space port has been done using FUSE, and ZFS is available on the BSD's.

Re:Of course Schwartz would say that.

[quantum bit]

But anyway, isn't ZFS under a license that can't be used in the Linux kernel, anyway? So it's incompatible with the GPL, not really 'free software'? <troll>That's the GPL's fault for being so narrow-minded, it has nothing to do with "free software". Other Free software, like FreeBSD for instance, has no problem using CDDL code.</troll>

Re:Ironic-- if true-- given NetApp's FOSS foundati

[Guy Harris]

I vaguely remember that NetApp machines run a stripped down version of BSD.

Data ONTAP (dating back to NetApp's first product, which means "before the marketing department came up with the name 'Data ONTAP'") isn't, and never was, a stripped-down version of BSD. It incorporated the BSD networking stack, and some BSD commands, but incorporated them into an OS that ran all processes in the same address space, in kernel mode, using message-passing.

The newer ONTAP GX is based on FreeBSD, as noted by another poster.

Re:This suit is more pathetic than funny

[BrainInAJar]

No, they bought some drivers so that they could incorporate them in to the x86 version of Solaris

And I think that was McNealy anyways, not Schwartz

Re:there's more to it

[alsta]

"Sun picked the CDDL because it's incompatible with the Linux kernel license (something that the Linux kernel developers simply cannot change)."

That's borderline cynical to say. You assume with this statement that Sun deliberately picked a license to be incompatible with the GPL, for the purpose of disallowing works published under it to be integrated with the Linux Kernel tarball:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_ faq/

If you wanted a copyleft license, why didn't you just use the GPL or LGPL?

We needed an open source license that allowed files released under the license to be linked with files released under other licenses. While a license like LGPL would allow this for dynamically-linked code, we also needed to be able to release software that statically links source files available under different licenses. In addition, we wanted to allow others to add externsions to OpenSolaris with different license terms. This was only possible under a license like the MPL; however, we could not use the MPL because it is not a "template" license allowing reuse by others. Consequently, we crafted a variant of the MPL, taking the opportunity to make it a template license as a step towards reducing license proliferation for others finding themselves in a similar position.