Submitted by In a blog post, Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz has announced that Sun will counter-sue Net App, after negotiations proved to be fruitless. “So now it looks like we can’t avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we’re headed. First, the basics. Sun indemnifies all its customers against IP claims like this. […] Second, Sun protects the communities using our technologies under free software licenses. […] Third, we file patents defensively.”
it seems like sun is just pouring gas on the fire, even though they have no interest is suing net app.
Defensively suing somebody? Is that like when Bush defensively attacked Iraq or?
Dont’ be stupid please.
Maybe you could elaborate on that analogy.
Network Appliance is suing Sun. Did Iraq attack the US?
Did Iraq attack the US?
Indirectly yes, they didn’t want to opensource the oil.
Had nothing to do with oil – if it had Saddam would still be alive and ruling Iraq – and be completely under US control. Today the situation is chaos in south, chaos in middle, and a semi-independent kurdic state in the north (not that I mind they are free – but it is a potential disaster) – and absolutely nothing under US control.
Heh. Apparently you don’t know a bit about politics. Oil was one of the few MAIN reasons to invade Iraq. The chaos you mention ALL started after invasion of Iraq. Have you seen the video in which they ask Dick Cheney why did they stop war on Iraq in 1991? He says because it would become out of control if we had continued. Now they once again invade Iraq accusing it of having WMDs, but in essence for control of Iraqi Oil supplies and more, and heck! They knew it would become like this…
Are you incapable of reading?
That’s EXACTLY what I wrote. You may want to put emphasis on after. But you are wrong about the oil. Oil was never the issue. Only muslims and socialists (including national socialists) put forth such lies. It was about removing Saddam from power and replace him with somebody more pro-democracy. Perfectly reasonable and rational thinking. The chaos happened due to being unprepared for the task of implementing democracy among muslims. Only among the kurds does democracy work. And they are rabid anti-muslim (which probably explains the success of democracy in Northern Iraq).
You are both wrong. The oil was never the issue. The reason was AIPAC. Dont you know that AIPAC dictates USA’s middle eastern politics? When USA exported weapons to Saudi Arabia, it was AIPAC’s president who decided the details, not USA’s president. AIPAC rules USA. It is as easy as that.
from wikipedia:
“In September of 2007, Congressmen Jim Moran of Virginia stated that AIPAC played a strong role in promoting the war in Iraq.[30] Moran noted that AIPAC is “the most powerful lobby and has pushed this war from the beginning. I don’t think they represent the mainstream of American *** thinking at all, but because they are so well organized, and their members are extraordinarily powerful — most of them are quite wealthy — they have been able to exert power.”[31]”
You know that Hamas, Hezbollah are terrorist organizations? It was USA that initiated that classification. And who, in USA, was the driving force? It was AIPAC again. AIPAC made Hamas and Hezbollah classify as terrorist organizations.
More information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC
Read the reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/They-Dare-Speak-Out-Institutions/dp/155652482…
Good blog post. It sounds like they’re doing the best they can with a broken system.
as I said, we have zero interest in suing them
So why YOU (sun) sued NetApp in first place? What I read here is very different from what Jonathan says: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html
“About 18 months ago, Sun’s lawyers contacted NetApp with a list of patents they say we infringe, and requested that we pay them lots of money. We responded in two ways. First, we closely examined their list of patents. Second, we identified the patents in our portfolio that we believe Sun infringes.
[…] “It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem” […]
“We filed suit against Sun because after we pointed out the WAFL patents, their lawyers stopped getting back to us. The first part of our suit is a declaratory judgment. It’s complicated, but the basic idea is that Sun claims we infringe their patents, so we are requesting a trial to show that’s not true. In essence, a declaratory judgment calls their bluff. It allows us to force a legal conclusion, rather than leaving this threat hanging over our heads. The second part is a complaint against Sun for infringing several WAFL patents with ZFS.”
The first part of NetApp’s suit doesn’t really sounds like Sun has “zero interest in suing them”. Or rather, it sounds like they had some interest, then their interest dissapeared when they realized that they could sue Sun’s ZFS with WAFL patents
Oh, and it’s not that I’ve to consider NetApp “evil”, or more evil than it is – NetApp contributes a bit of code to the Linux Kernel, for example. Stop that “we’re OSS friends, support us” writing, please. Opensourcing is one (nice) thing, but patent games between corporations are a very different thing. Jonathan has said in the past that he believes in IP and patents, and Sun acts accordingly – it’s not really a place where you want to take the FOSS people’s opinions
Edited 2007-10-24 21:11
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trolling
Dmitri
Yeah, and here (http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/litigoperation-.html) is a post from Netapps with an email from Sun’s lawers:
http://www.netapp.com/go/Sun%20Lawyer%20Email.pdf “Over a year and half ago, StorageTek/Sun provided claim charts mapping onto NetApp products and you claimed they were inadequate. Yet you didn’t provide any such claim chart in your letter […]”
So, this phrase from Schwartz’s blog: “Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun’s patents” looks at least a bit contradictory with…what his own lawyer says.
As much as I hate patents, to it looks clearly like it was Sun who started it all – so i don’t fully believe Jonathan when he tries to make Netapp look like the evil, propietary company that is trying to kill Open Source. When it comes to patents, Sun is not very different from Microsoft or many other big company.
Edited 2007-10-24 21:27
>So, this phrase from Schwartz’s blog: “Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun’s patents” looks at least a bit contradictory with…what his own lawyer says.
I don’t know any people who call this letter ‘suing’. It’s just the usual talk between lawyers. Some sabre-rattling.
NetApp actually has a pretty decent amount of code in the Linux kernel. They have been making Linux a *much* better nfs client.
See this search:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=site%3Alkml…
Trond Myklebust is in fact the NFS maintainer….i didn’t now he was a netapp employee. Looking at my archives, there’re at least another two netapp employers posting to the list (Thomas Talpey and James Lentini)
Sun invented NFS. It’s pretty hard to one-up that
Sure, but Netapp has contributed code to the NFS Linux implementation, ie: they’contributing to a FOSS project, which is what the poster tried to say
The point is that NetApp wouldn’t have anything to contribute if Sun hadn’t invented NFS in the first place.
I don’t know what your point about NetApp contributing to a FOSS project is about either.
Sun contributes far more to FOSS any other company.
Not only that, NetApp’s contributions to FOSS are in their own best interest — they make Linux work better with their *proprietary, overpriced* products.
Contrast to Sun where anyone can use any system and run ZFS on it and get many of the same benefits NetApp provides without paying a dime to Sun and with all the source code.
Edited 2007-10-24 22:47 UTC
As diegocg pointed out, a guy from NetApp is the Linux NFS maintainer. NetApp is not the “Evil company” that Schwartz points them out to be. Not that either company is perfect, just that Schwartz is quite a bit biased.
Both NetApp and Sun have blood on their hands but Schwartz trying to have NetApp stop selling filers is like asking Microsoft to stop selling Office. It won’t happen.
As far as I’m concerned any company that sues another over patents is evil. NetApp initiated this battle so they’re at fault as far as I’m concerned.
The same is true for NetApp.
The real truth here is that NetApp is scared to death that ZFS + commodity hardware is going to do the same thing they do cheaper (even free!) and it’s going to put them out of business. I hope it does.
Software patents must die!
Many software patents should die. The ones that seem so obvious for starters.
However, if you think software patents should all die then remind yourself this view if you invent something truly patentable that should afford you licensing royalties or products that make you a wealthy soul.
I doubt you’ll be happy if you pour a bunch of work into it and see that it gets looted and copied without any legal recourse.
Good point. Software patents, and patents in the general sense should not just necessarily be thrown out the door. Fact of the matter is companies that spend a considerable amount of time and money in R&D simply need a return on their investment. Anyone thinking that any company is going to spend money on some technology only to give it out to others for free either lives in fantasy land, or is just plain brain dead. And this whole blog response from Sun, sadly just does not mesh with the facts of the case that have been reported over the past few months.
One of the things Donald Knuth has pointed out is that patenting software is ludicrous. You’re trying to patent a prime number, essentially.
The point of the patent system is to encourage scientific progress, etc. and reward inventors for a set time for novel inventions.
However, the problem with software patents is that most inventions are obvious.
That is why I and many others are against software patents. It stifles innovation, rewards the patent trolls, and allows people to hold legal power over obvious inventions.
Sun don’t want to stop the shipping; Sun loses because there are NetApp customers who are also Sun customers (and vice versa) – all Sun is trying to do is force NetApp to the negotiations table.
As for the post made by diegocg a while back, Sun didn’t make the first move in the suing. Sun offered them an IP sharing arrangement – BOTH would benefit, not just Sun. It was NetApp who became the “nigel no-mate” and refused to play ball. If NetApp want to be anti-social, then so be it, but don’t bring everyone else down into that personal hell of theirs.
Edited 2007-10-25 02:25
Yes, I really want them to settle. We have a lot of Solaris servers and also many netapps.
They both make great products, suing each other is the last thing we want to see.
Agreed, my company is one of NetApp’s reference customers and buys Sun’s servers like water. Their remote management (ILOMS) are some of the best on the market. Way better than IBMs laughable RSA II cards.
http://www.netapp.com/library/cs/ticketmaster_article.pdf
They will settle this out of court after both sides are through with it.
A bit off topic but is there anywhere on the web that will give you the entire audit of which companies and corporations contribute to the Linux kernel? It’s beginning to smell (if not yet taste) like a witch’s brew…is it?
And all the while, zumastor hums along. Soon enough, we will have an open source alternative to NetApp’s proprietary SnapMirror technology. It supports things like compression which NetApp does not
http://zumastor.googlepages.com/
And all the while, zumastor hums along. Soon enough, we will have an open source alternative to NetApp’s proprietary SnapMirror technology. It supports things like compression which NetApp does not
This is interesting, but the project page refers to the software as pre-alpha. If by ‘soon’ you mean ‘by next decade’, I’m with you 100%.
Now, in principle, I am no fan of NetApp as a company even if they have some nice products–their products are intensely proprietary and extremely overpriced. They mostly seem focused on milking a legacy market for all it is worth. But the main difference between something like this link and their stuff is that their stuff works now.
Sure, they have committed code to Linux that makes their products work better with Linux. But I would like to see them contribute code to Linux that improves Linux’s sucky volume management, for example. Not going to happen. Won’t sell filers.
In short, there is an ‘open source alternative’ to NetApp and SnapMirror. It is called ZFS (and Sun AVS, if you want). It’s not surprising that we ended up here.
For people that aren’t into using Solaris and instead prefer Linux, ZFS isn’t usable. Please don’t bring up the FUSE port of ZFS. You can’t expect anyone to take you seriously saying you should use FUSE in production for actually important data.
If you follow Zumastor development, they’ve been gearing up for a first release. As a matter of fact, they’ve only been doing bugfixing for the past few months. Its just a matter of time.
ZFS is really cool, but not for everyone. Also, the DragonflyBSD developer isn’t sold on ZFS. He wrote his own filesystem and has some compelling arguments *against* ZFS:
http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER_Filesystem_Design
For people that aren’t into using Solaris and instead prefer Linux, ZFS isn’t usable. Please don’t bring up the FUSE port of ZFS. You can’t expect anyone to take you seriously saying you should use FUSE in production for actually important data.
Who said anything about FUSE? I agree with you entirely, but as far as I am concerned, the Linux folks’ complaints about not being able to use ZFS are about as reasonable as a vegetarian complaining about not being able to use delicious, juicy hamburgers, because they happen to be made of meat.
If you follow Zumastor development, they’ve been gearing up for a first release. As a matter of fact, they’ve only been doing bugfixing for the past few months. Its just a matter of time.
Again, I agree, but so what? Everything is a matter of time. Pre-alpha is their own description, and considering your opionion of using FUSE for production data, why get excited about pre-alpha storage management software? FUSE is likely to be more stable
ZFS is really cool, but not for everyone. Also, the DragonflyBSD developer isn’t sold on ZFS. He wrote his own filesystem and has some compelling arguments *against* ZFS:
People are still allowed to write their own filesystems. In Dillon’s case, he seemed to argue that ZFS was not appropriate for extremely distributed filesystems. This is sensible since it was not even designed to be mounted by two local machines at once.
I don’t want to be a jerk about Zumastor, it looks interesting. But you have to be realistic. By ‘open-source’ alternitive I am now guessing you meant ‘Linux alternative’. Not the same thing. Dillon rejected ZFS because it doesn’t fit his technical goals. Linux is another story entirely.
ZFS is CDDL. CDDL is not GPL compatible hence it will never make it into Linux. Please don’t turn this into a GPL vs CDDL or Sun is going to some magical day in the future GPLv3 Solaris debate. Those go nowhere.
You are right on everypoint. I was just saying that Zumastor is an up-and-coming giant that people seem to skipover. So what if google uses it internally (oops, did I say that?), it is small fries until its kernelpatches make it into mainline. FYI: Daniel Phillips, the lead Zumastor developer is the guy who wrote the original LVM implementation for Linux. Those guys know what they are doing.
ZFS is cool, and currently it is the only open source kickass filesystem. That doesn’t mean it always will be
All told, this will be an interesting case.
First, Sun has laid it all out, so there isn’t going to be any easy way to weasel out of what Jonathan has stated on his blog in case things go wrong.
NetApp has less to lose here I think. Some, certainly, but still less to lose.
I mean, let’s be serious, there’s no way NetApp is going to be pulling its products off of the market. That’s simply not going to happen.
And NetApp can’t really put the ZFS genie back in the bottle. ZFS is out. It’s not going back.
So, we’ll let these guys just bash it out and see what happens.
I wonder if Sun filed their suit in East Texas too…
You two completely miss the point about what’s bad about software patents (and technology patents in general). They do not prevent copying like copyrights do (for an insane amount of time), they prevent independent rediscovery of the same thing. So if Company A invests $100 million and finishes inventing a new way to wax widgets a week before Company B (who also invested $100 million), then Company B is out of luck. The thought is that it encourages companies to publish the patent rather than locking it up as a trade secret, but most such patents, in the software field at least, are merely natural evolutions of the field, so that reason flies out the window and makes it hard for anybody to avoid accidentally avoid stepping on a patent. Which lasts for 20 years (not counting sneaky ways to extend it thanks to bad USPTO rules), which in the technology field means that the patent is useless once it’s no longer protected. Unlike in most other fields that do not change nearly as rapidly.
If patents worked like copyrights and did not protect against others independently coming up with the same thing, a lot fewer people would be complaining. Not to mention that software is one of the only things that can be covered by both patent and copyright. Why should software be more locked up than both books (copyright-only) and steel girder production (patent-only)?
I’m not sure why you consider “independent discovery” to be so important. Technology has always been a race. Everyone can’t win.
It also doesn’t matter how much, or how little has been spent on the invention, it’s the results that matter.
My only real objection to the way software patents are handled is that they are too long. I feel as though they should be for a profitable, but shorter time. How long is something that needs to be decided, but I would think that between 5 and 8 years would be about right.
Yes, technology has indeed always been a race. And whoever discovers it first will always have the lead in getting the finished product out to market, without any IP protection whatsoever, assuming they’re remotely competent in the production side of things.
The main issue that I see is why should someone be granted an exclusive right to the technology just because they happened to discover it first? I can see legit arguments as to why others shouldn’t be able to copy, but I can’t think of one good reason why somebody who discovers it without any reference to (or, indeed, knowledge of in many cases) the first discoverer, should owe the first discoverer a cent. There is no connection between the two discoverers.
Say Sun develops a method to transmit data over the electrical grid at amazing speeds. They do not patent the technology, then another company steps in, uses this technology and is the first out the door with some new device.
The reality that has existed for so many years is that companies enter into agreements and cross-patent deals. This has been going on since for decades. While many were whining and crying about the Microsoft-Novell deal, my first reaction was…so? In fact many technologies and IT related inventions you use on a daily basis exist from company A, because they licensed it from company B.
I do agree though that it is unique that software is able to have both copyright and patent, but then again software is unique in of itself when compared to books or steel girders. The one aspect that I took from the recent EU vs. Microsoft issue was that governments, societies, business, and the legal system are still working out how to understand and deal with technology.
Put another way, if I develop a new CODEC that allows for HD quality over the internet, not only do I want to copyright the CODEC, but a patent to the technology itself. Otherwise, any other company would simply reverse engineer, alter, and then produce in capabilities I do not have. But, with the code patented, any companies would have to come to an agreement. Yes I understand that maybe they may possibly have come up with something similar, but in the end, as melgross points out, this is how the business world works. Otherwise what is to stop other companies from just sitting around and waiting for me to publish so they can basically take my ideas? So while the company may lose out on being first to the market, they do have the option of always agreeing to terms.
Fact of the matter is, companies today are simply not going to invest the time and money without insuring that their investment is protected. While it is a nice fantasy that we could just do without all patents, copyrights, etc..fact is developers need to get paid, and companies simply do not pay salaries with no return.
Thomas Edison is probably the most brilliant inventor ever. He spent his latter years in court, instead of lab, trying to convince people that DC distribution was better than AC. You can either do what you love or make money. If you don’t mind being poor, you can do what you love. Artists must choose between being popular in their lives and wealthy or popular after they die, staying true to themselves and being poor.
Since AC is better than DC does that still mean he is the most brilliant inventor ever? 0_o
It means that Nicolai Tesla was more “Brilliant” than Edison.
What if you love making money?
Or what if money makes it possible for you to do what you love?
Mammon led them on […]
By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold…
– Paradise Lost
nfs… man, netapp is f–ked, i hate that company and its people.