Tim Cook <tim <at> cook.ms> writes: > You are not a court of law, and that statement has not been tested. It is your opinion and nothing more. I'd appreciate if every time you repeated that statement, you'd preface it with "in my opinion" so you don't have people running around believing what they're doing is safe. I'd hope they'd be smart enough to consult with a lawyer, but it's probably better to just not spread unsubstantiated rumor in the first place. > > --Tim
Hi guys, I am one of the ZFS porting folks at FreeBSD. You might want to look at this site: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/ There are three main threatening Netapp patents mentioned: 5,819,292 - "copy on write" 7,174,352 - "filesystem snapshot" 6,857,001 - "writable snapshots" You can examine the documents at: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/documents.jsp 5,819,292: This one as a final action by the U.S. Patent Office from 16.06.2009. In this action almost all claims subject to reexamination were rejected by the Office (due to anticipation), only claims 1, 21 and 22 were confirmed as patentable. These claims are not significant for copy-on-write. So you can consider the copy-on-write patent by Netapp rejected. With this document in your hands they cannot expect winning a lawsuit against you on copy-on-write anymore as there is not much from the patent left over. 7,174,352: This patent has a non-final action rejecting all the claims due to anticipation. There may exist a final action that confirms this, but its not among the documents. If there is a final action, you can use any filesystem that does snapshots without risking a lawsuit from Netapp. The non-final action document a very strong asset in your hands, anyway :-) 6,857,001: No documents for this patent at the site. So you can use copy-on-write - as to the documents all relevant parts of the patent are rejected. Snapshots - the non-final action document is a good asset, but I don't know if there is a final action document. This patent can be considered as "almost" rejected. Clones - no idea But remember, this goes for ANY filesystems, this isn't only about ZFS. So every filesystem doing snapshots or clones (btrfs?) should actually have a permission from Netapp as they involve their patents ;-) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
