NetApp has asked one of their competitors, Coraid, to halt the sales of their EtherDrive Z-Series NAS appliances. The reason? Coraid is using the ZFS file system. Coraid has sent a letter to their customers announcing a temporary sales stop. The Z-Series NAS was announced in May, so NetApp didn’t waste any time in sending their legal threats.
Sun open sourced the Zettabyte File System in 2005, and since 2007 NetApp has been engaged in several lawsuits against Sun. NetApp claims ZFS infringes on several of their patents. Sun was pretty public about the suits, providing up-to-date information on their website and communicating about this with their customers in an open manner. Since Oracle acquired Sun, however, things have changed.
NetApp and Oracle are reported to be in settlement talks, and the information on Sun’s website has not been updated for half a year. It makes sense from Oracle’s perspective; they are interested in hardware to run their software on. While the Solaris operating system provides a solid foundation for this, Oracle does not have anything to gain by supporting an open source version of this. Neither do they have any interest in supporting competitors using their own file system, such as Coraid and Nexenta.
What does that mean for users of the ZFS file system? Sun has always claimed things looked to be going their way, but I expect Oracle to want a quick settlement with NetApp. Whether that includes any provisions for users of the ZFS version that was released as open source remains to be seen. And since file systems are pretty generic, one has to wonder whether other open source file systems are safe from patent lawsuits.
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