Sun To Seek Injunction, Damages Against NetApp 183
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."
Re:Funny thing (Score:2, Interesting)
When used in a server environment, Solaris isn't merely a "good" OS. It's an excellent OS. In terms of scalability, it doesn't have any competitors. OSes like Linux, HP-UX, and AiX still can't match it, although they usually don't fare too badly themselves.
And ZFS is very stable. Although it's a relatively new product, it has still gone through many years of strenuous testing within Sun, plus even more outside in the real world. It's known to handle terabyte-sized data sets with ease. And its data integrity mechanisms do help to ensure that data corruption is only the work of buggy userland application software, rather than ZFS or Solaris itself.
This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, "innovation" means "doing something new" -- not "copying what someone else has done". There are certainly implementational issues with the patent system as it currently exists, but in principle the patent system is all about protecting people who do something new from corporations (like Sun or Microsoft) who just reimplement without adding anything new.
Re:Funny thing (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course, I probably read this on a blog, so don't take my word for it.
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:old news. (Score:5, Interesting)
We have a sales team in the US but there's no legal company there, to protect ourselves.
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of the drugs industry (frequently raised as a pro-patent argument) - where you need mandatory regulation anyway to ensure drugs are safe and effective, surely it would be quite straightforward to grant a fixed-term exclusive license as part of the (expensive) approval process? No need to get bogged down with lawyers trying to decide who "owns" the underlying knowledge - you pay to get something licensed in a particular country, you get a N year monopoly.
Re:This is why we need to get rid of software pate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely what you're describing is copyright, not patenting. Being a granted a monopoly on a specific implementation is copyright. Regarding what you said about the drug industry - if your scheme was put in place, what would be the incentive to develop the drugs in the first place? If you come up with a cure for AIDS and start marketing it, then a month later someone comes up with a way to churn your pills out faster and cheaper, and there no possible way for you to do it more efficiently than them, they get to eat your lunch with impugnity, since you would be forbidden from emulating their process, and they arent forbidden from raping your hard earned R&D assets.
Re:Translation for the non-lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, I can think of one former Netapp kernel developer I met in another role where he couldn't understand why we published our Linux kernel patches, and thought we could reverse engineer any new Linux kernel back to his antique codebase for any new features we wanted, rather than releasing his modifications so that they would enter the Linux kernel development world and we could stop backporting and get some work done.
Re:Translation for the non-lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
A patent is on an implementation. Abstract ideas are not patentable. That's why software patents make no sense, as software is already protected by copyright.
At least in Europe it still works that way
And with regards to drugs, if some else is so much smarter then you that they can produce the same pills a lot cheaper then maybe you're in the wrong business. Do you want to withhold the sick population from cheaper drugs just because the current patent holder is too dumb to produce it cheaper? I personally do not. Patents take away the need to innovate and thus they are bad.
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
The only problem I have is with your suggestion as to how to fix it. The patent office would need to be vastly increased in size in order to cope with having people with a higher degree of specialisation. This would also result in the patent office having to hire more expensive staff (better qualifications and specialised expertise is not cheap).
This would in turn put up the tax bill for the average american, and we know how much they love politicians suggesting higher taxes. The other issue is that this would negatively impact on patent lawyers earnings. The large patent law firms would therefore lobby very hard against such a move.
Sun's claiming NetApps patents are dirty (Score:1, Interesting)
And if Sun's CEO is right about his implications regarding the NFS license, the entire foundation of NetApp's business is going to get washed away. Because it was Sun who did the innovating with NFS.
From my reading of the case, NetApp is fucked. Sun's claims are not likely to be false - they actually reference previous cases regarding the technology that shows up in NetApps patents where NetApp had to settle because NetApp stole the technology, and then NetApp misrepresented that in their patent applications regarding that very same technology...
To repeat: NetApp has done NOTHING innovative and they look FUCKED.
Re:This is why we need to KEEP software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps part (1/2?) of the fees above some limit could be paid on an installment basis over the life of the patent (possibly with interest) - and the patent holder could decide to stop making the payments and thereby irrevocably release the patent into the Public Domain. On the positive side, this would help the "little guy" a bit as some of the expenses could be deferred or, even never incurred. It would also open up patents more quickly to the Public Domain if the inventor ('s company) hadn't figured out how to commercially exploit the patent. Also, on the positive side it would tend to reduce, over time, the number of active patents and thereby reduce the search effort (for both the applicant and the patent office) and also remove some of the mines from the minefield that technology companies walk every day. On the negative side, some of the expenses of patent applications would eventually be borne by the taxpayer or by amortizing the ultimately unrecovered costs across other patent applications.
Re:Translation for the non-lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is precisely why NetApp is scared of ZFS. Because it lets you do snapshots & cloning in near realtime without using any space.
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/ [opensolaris.org]