I received this update from Sun Microsystems on Tuesday on the ongoing ZFS patent litigation with NetApp. While colored by its source, the news seems positive for Sun (and, given the importance of ZFS, for the open-source development community). Sun has succeeded in getting the venue changed to California and it appears that its public request for examples of prior art have yielded fruit.
What follows was sent to me by Sun:
As of Friday, December 14, Sun has filed reexamination requests for three Network Appliance patents as part of its response to a lawsuit initially filed by Network Appliance against Sun on September 5, 2007. This follows the agreement last month with Network Appliance to transfer Network Appliance's lawsuit from Texas and litigate it along with the case Sun filed in California. The motion to transfer was filed on November 21 and the cases are now assigned to a mutually agreed upon judge. With each company being headquartered in northern California and the majority of inventors and innovation in dispute originating in California, it makes sense for this case to be litigated in this jurisdiction. We are pleased that Network Appliance agreed to Sun's request and retracted its imprudent choice of venue for this litigation.
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(Credit:
Sun Microsystems)
I first met Ian Murdock, now head of Sun Microsystems' operating-system platform strategy, back in 2002 at a conference. I was a bit in awe at the founder of Debian, only to find out that he's a very genuine, very likable person. I've kept in touch with Ian through the years, and on Monday was fortunate to catch up with him to find out how his move to Sun has gone for him, and what he's brewing.
Give me a quick update on life at Sun.
... Read moreIt's fascinating to see how blogs are being used these days.
On Wednesday, Dave Hitz, co-founder of NetApp, used his blog to explicate the company's reasons for suing Sun Microsystems over ZFS patent infringement. On Thursday, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, fired back using his own blog, telling a very different story from Hitz's.
And, when I asked NetApp to respond to why it had chosen to respond to Sun now, rather than when Sun announced it was open-sourcing ZFS, Hitz replied...in a comment to my blog.
This is a very new world we live in. It's also one that Schwartz is convinced open source will win, as he suggests (in his blog):
... Read moreApple has clarified reports regarding the use of Sun's ZFS file system in Leopard, confirming that ZFS is present in the operating system but that Apple has not yet made it the default file system.
Last week, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said that Apple planned to announce a switch to ZFS as the basic file system for Mac OS X at its Worldwide Developers Conference. That announcement didn't arrive on Monday as part of the WWDC extravaganza, and then Information Week reported Monday that an Apple executive denied that ZFS was present in Leopard.
The full story emerged on Tuesday: apparently the executive misspoke. Leopard will support two file systems, the HFS+ technology currently found in Mac OS X, as well as ZFS, a next-generation file system developed by Sun and unveiled in 2005. However, HFS+ will remain the default option.
If you're familiar with the ins and outs of file system technology, you'll know the ramifications. If you don't, here's a quick and dirty explanation.
File systems outline how information is stored on a computer. They are complicated beasts that generally are kept in place for years as operating systems change around them. Windows supports two file systems, the older FAT32 technology and the default NTFS technology, which has been around since the introduction of Windows NT in 1993.
Apple's HFS+ was introduced with Mac OS 8.1. Adding ZFS to the mix basically means that you can take advantage of a number of features, like adding huge amounts of storage, that my colleague Declan McCullagh outlines here. At some point, Apple will likely make ZFS the default file system for Mac OS X, but Sun hasn't even gotten around to doing that yet for Solaris 10. These transitions can take years.
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