On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 03:43:38PM -0500, Rob Windsor wrote:
> http://news.com.com/NetApp+files+patent+suit+against+Sun/2100-1014_3-6206194.html
>
> I'm curious how many of those patent filings cover technologies that
> they carried over from Auspex.
>
> While it is legal for them to do so, it is a bit shady to inherit
> technology (two paths; employees departing Auspex and the Auspex
> bankruptcy asset buyout), file patents against that technology, and then
> open suits against other companies based on (patents covering) that
> technology.
>
> (No, I'm not defending Sun in it's apparent patent-growling, either, it
> all sucks IMO.)
DISCLAIMER: I've not read any of those patents, nor do I intend to, nor
did I have anything to do with the design or implementation
of ZFS. Also, IANAL.
To me ZFS is very, very similar to 4.4BSD's Log Structured Filesystem.
Both are have strong similarities to transactional databases.
My token effort to blog about ZFS when it came out was, in fact, a
comparison to 4.4BSD LFS.
I don't know about any patents in this area nor about their timelines,
but I imagine that there's a *lot* of prior art in the 4.4.BSD LFS
history and in the transactional database literature going back several
decades. Art on 4.4BSD LFS first appeared no later than June 1990, and
perhaps much earlier. Transactional DB literature goes back at least to
the early 80s. I.e., my uneducated guess is that there's enough prior
art to blow most any patent claims about ZFS out of the water. (You
might take this to mean that ZFS is not all that original. I think that
in a way that is quite so, but there's plenty of originality in ZFS:
RAID-Z [which depends on checksum trees], awesomely simple and
user-friendly CLIs, etc...)
Another disclaimer: I've no idea whether ZFS's designers had 4.4BSD's
LFS in mind or knew about it when they came up with
ZFS.
Nico
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