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:Translation for the non-lawyers

[chuckymonkey]

Thank you for the insight, but really did NetApp write the code for ZFS? No? That's what I thought, the key difference is that it is an idea, not a product that they patented and it's very broad reaching at that. That's where the problem arises in software, there are very many different ways to attain the same goals. If they had patented an idea for say the actual appliance and software together as a product/method that's different and they should be protected, they should not however be protected when someone can take an idea they had and make a better product than them as that's called competition and advancing the state of the art. Do you think that it would have been good if someone patented the clickable button? What about a scroll bar? Maybe someone should have patented GUI. Would computing technology have reached the state it's in had these things been patented when they were dreamed up?