George William Herbert wrote: >> http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html > > Curiously, I posted to the blog comments last night discussing some > of the prior art, going back to some of the "disks could do this too" > discussions by early tree structured binary data structures inventions, > mentioning other copy-on-write structure ideas floating around in the > late 80s and early 90s, etc. > > And it went away. There's only a very generic fake post with my name > on it there this morning. > > Either they have a bug, or they slimed their own comments section.
My comment, which I posted to both Hitz' and Schwartz' blogs, was also censored only on the latter. Here it is: ---- As others have pointed out, the main ideas behind copy-on-write and always-consistent-on-disk filesystems, such as WOFS, LSF, and Tux2, clearly predate both WAFL and ZFS. The "Primäre Superblock" in WOFS, for example, plays the same role as the "root node" in WAFL or the "überblock" in ZFS. Most of the other claims described in the patents are trivial applications of general-purpose data structures to filesystems. So none of the 10 patents involved in this dispute should ever have been granted. (Even to the minority of the technical community who think that software patents should be reformed rather than scrapped entirely, these particular patents are not defensible.) Both companies are trying to spin the history of this patent dispute in their favour, as you'd perhaps expect. But if you dig a bit deeper, it's worse than that -- there are inconsistencies in each story indicating that one or both must be untruthful, and my impression is that it's both. In NetApp's case, they make a cynical attempt to claim opposition to software patents despite having form in using them offensively (e.g. against BlueArc). In Sun's case, trying to extort ~$36.5M out of NetApp for the StorageTek patents (see http://www.netapp.com/go/Sun%20Lawyer%20Email.pdf) is very far from "not demanding anything". Neither company comes out with any credit, and regardless of the legal outcomes, both deserve to lose from this affair in the court of public opinion. ---- (And yes, I do mean "extort". The whole patent system has degenerated into legalized extortion.) -- David Hopwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
