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The new open source lawsuit – ZFS

, September 5, 2007 @ 2:30 pm ET

NetApp is suing Sun Microsystems over the ZFS file system technology (press release). It’s a software patent case, headed for East Texas. The problem? Sun released ZFS as open source, complicating the situation.

451 Storage Analyst Henry Baltazar and I spoke with Dave Hitz, founder and EVP of Network Appliance, briefly by phone today about the lawsuit and the implications for the open source community. Hitz is the named inventor on five of the Network Appliance patents at issue. He has posted an entry about the lawsuit on his blog – NetApp Sues Sun for ZFS Patent Infringement. Take a look. Hitz told me that this case is about NetApp and Sun, not the open source community that has emerged around ZFS, and NetApp does not intend to go after the ZFS community. That said, I can only imagine how vociferous the voices from the open source blogging community are going to be about this case. Many people were looking for an example case to represent the challenges of the software patent system when pertaining to mainstream open source projects. I think this might well be it.

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Comments (5) Categories: Software,Storage

5 Responses to “The new open source lawsuit – ZFS”

  1. Swashbuckler says:
    September 5, 2007 at 4:59 pm

    headed for East Texas

    Wouldn’t happen to be Marshall, TX and the courtroom of Judge John Ward, would it?

  2. Josh Berkus says:
    September 8, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    Raven,

    It’s hard to buy the “it’s not about open source” line. If NetApp gets an injunction (unlikely) how would that *not* affect ZFS? For that matter, if NetApp’s complaint is legitimate, why are they filing suit in East Texas?

  3. Pedro Gimeno says:
    September 18, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Hitz told me that this case is about NetApp and Sun, not the open source community that has emerged around ZFS, and NetApp does not intend to go after the ZFS community.

    This reminds me so much of Unisys and the GIF/LZW matter… Soon after they knew they had a patent on the LZW algorithm that was being used worldwide, they said they did not inted to go after the free software community. Not much later, however,they just changed their mind.

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