Sun To Seek Injunction, Damages Against NetApp

Zeddicus_Z writes to note that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has outlined Sun's response to Network Appliance's recent patent infringement lawsuit over ZFS: "As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license — on which Network Appliance was started. In addition... we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform... [Regarding NetApp's demands in order to drop its existing case against Sun:] ...[to] unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community, and to limit ZFS's allowable field of use to computers — and to forbid its use in storage devices."

Comments

Re:old news.

[rucs_hack]

For me, quite a lot. I'm wanting to start up a software house some time in the next year. These patent wars frankly wory me. I don't know if I'd be that keen on entering the US market, since some shark will no doubt try to take a bite if my product is seen to be making money. Better to work in Europe and the far east methinks.

Yeah, software piracy is a tad rife there, but I'd rather be strategising against pirates (services instead of software payment etc), than have my company gutted because of some shitbar patent suit in texas.

Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents

[ZorbaTHut]

The problem is that "copyright" and the logical extension of "patenting" physical objects are the same thing.

You don't copyright a stove, because people can't just copy it. You patent it, and now people can't build an identical stove, even if they could build something very stovelike. But with software, you copyright the software, and now people can't copy it. Patenting would, in theory, fulfill the exact same purpose - "you can't build the identical software" - and that's software patents are kind of bizarre and shouldn't even exist.

Instead, though, patents are being treated as "one step up from copyright" - you can't build an identical stove, and you "can't build software that does the same thing". Which isn't the equivalent of patents at all. It's more the equivalent of a concept monopoly. If software patents were imported right back into the physical world, you'd have people able to put patent on "cars", or "stoves", as an entire class of thing.

I don't think software patents need to be "fixed". I don't think they need to be "abolished". I think what's necessary is realization that the entire concept of "software patent" doesn't even make sense, and that there really is no parallel with the physical world here.