Sun v NetApp: Round 2

Sun has countersued Network Appliance in what's shaping up as a major confrontation, if not the storage technology lawsuit of the decade.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz described Sun's legal action (a copy of which can be found here) in his blog yesterday. Sun is suing NetApp, he stated, to obtain -- are you sitting down? -- a permanent injunction to remove all NetApp filers from the marketplace and obtain "sizeable monetary damages." The action, which Schwartz says he's taking against his preference, is necessary because NetApp won't budge on its stance against Sun:

Schwartz vows to use any proceeds of court compensation to promote the open-source cause, specifically by donating to The Software Freedom Law Center, to a U.S. government project called Peer-to-Patent, and to the legal defense and venture funding of "free software innovators."

Sun's action is a response to NetApp's initial volley a few weeks ago. In that first motion (a copy of which can be found here, along with other documents pertaining to this case), NetApp accuses Sun of deploying technology NetApp says it patented. The technology was used in NetApp's foundation file system, Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL), and in NetApp's RAID subsystem.

"It looks like ZFS [Sun's Zettabyte File System] was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights," stated Dave Hitz, NetApp founder and EVP in his own blog last month. NetApp is also seeking product injunctions and damages.Hitz took to his blog again today to defend NetApp's position relative to Schwartz's blog and Sun's suit:

"Jonathan’s claim that 'you cannot unfree what is free' sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that you can steal anything, as long as you open source it afterwards. That can’t be right!"

In Hitz's view, Sun open-sourced something that didn't belong to Sun -- ZFS -- and it must be stopped.

So the fight has escalated. Whether it gets to court and who wins are issues that likely will take months to resolve. In the meantime, an early poll of Byte and Switch readers showed just a few are really concerned that the kerfuffle will really affect end users.

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