Netapp and patents

Posted Jun 22, 2007 7:10 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: okay but, by qu1j0t3
Parent article: Linus on GPLv3 and ZFS

I suppose NetApp has patents too, but perhaps Linus wishes to imply that they would be more tractable to deal with than Sun

Yes, Netapp has patents, and they caused Daniel Phillips to stop working on the tux2 filesystem; I have not followed the story enough to know if Netapp did anything other than file the patents to achieve this result.

Netapp's WAFL is not very interesting for Linux anyway, because it requires special NVRAM hardware to buffer writes during some of the more time-consuming operations (e.g., snapshot creation). I don't think that this hardware dependence can be eliminated without major changes to the WAFL code.

Concerning not breaking Sun patents, you can look for older sources where similar ideas have been described, e.g., various papers on log-structured file systems, e.g., our Freenix 2000 paper, or (maybe too young) my file system ideas.