Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses IT

Sun CEO Says NetApp Lied in Fear of Open Source 139

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the ph34r-m3 dept.
Lucas123 writes "In reaction to NetApp's patent infringement lawsuit against Sun, CEO Jonathan Schwartz today said in his blog that NetApp basically lied in its legal filing when it said Sun asked them for licensing fees for use of their ZFS file system technology. In a separate statement, Sun said NetApp's lawsuit is about fear over open-source ZFS technology as a competitive threat. 'The rise of the open-source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors. I guess not everyone's learned that lesson'."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Sun CEO Says NetApp Lied in Fear of Open Source More

Sun CEO Says NetApp Lied in Fear of Open Source

Comments Filter:
  • I vaguely remember that NetApp machines run a stripped down version of BSD. So perhaps this is FUD from Sun.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Guy Harris ( 3803 )

      I vaguely remember that NetApp machines run a stripped down version of BSD.

      Data ONTAP (dating back to NetApp's first product, which means "before the marketing department came up with the name 'Data ONTAP'") isn't, and never was, a stripped-down version of BSD. It incorporated the BSD networking stack, and some BSD commands, but incorporated them into an OS that ran all processes in the same address space, in kernel mode, using message-passing.

      The newer ONTAP GX is based on FreeBSD, as noted by another p

  • The battlin' bloggers (Score:5, Funny)

    by eln ( 21727 ) * on Friday September 07, 2007 @10:14AM (#20507327)
    In response to Schwartz, Netapp CEO Dan Warmenhoven declared that he was not in fact lying. Rather, Schwartz was the one lying, indicating further that Schwartz's pants were on fire. Schwartz angrily denied this with a fuming "nuh uh!" and indicated Warmenhoven was a chicken. Warmenhoven then retorted by comparing himself to rubber and Mr. Schwartz to glue.

    Stay tuned for the next exciting installment, where Schwartz will compare his father's fighting ability and overall physical prowess with that of Warmenhoven's father.

  • Suits and countersuits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CodeShark ( 17400 ) <ellsworthpc@NOspAm.yahoo.com> on Friday September 07, 2007 @10:15AM (#20507335) Homepage
    All based on what? Patents on software algorithms, that brainchild of the '90's when some legal geniuses decided that "how you do business" is as patentable as a device, which was not the intent of the Founding Fathers of the good ole' US of A.

    Well, like my own position on buying stuff from Amazon or Disney (which means that at present I have spent $0 on them in the last ten years), I think I can successfully live without tech from Sun OR NetApp -- until the current software patent madness comes to an end -- or at least the injunction induced extortion rackets die down.

    Which is where Open Source and GPL'd software really starts to make sense, don't you think?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Probably the only way to end the madness of patents is to push for patentability of legal arguments and contractual clauses - the former are quite closely analogous to business methods and the latter to software. Lawyers might start singing a different tune if they have to pay Beelzebub, Belial and Azazel USD20000 each time they write a contract that uses the subjunctive or something like that.
    • Good luck living without Java, OpenOffice (or MS Office, I assume if you are boycotting Sun then MS was on the list long ago), or any other tech from Sun.
      • Well, I have to use MS-Office, etc. at work. But none of my deployed websites for my customers use Java, and OpenOffice is already OS licensed -- which excludes it from my boycott list. But I won't go to something with ZFS until the patent mess is out of the way.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by heybo ( 667563 )
          Hey dude ZFS IS! Open Sourced. This crap is over Sun open sourcing ZSF. You might want to check too over 25% of your code base in GNU/Linux came from Sun. You shouldn't bad mouth your friends.
          • Have I spoken against Sun's code or against the legal system that results in these weird patent fights?

            One of the reasons that my sig states that Open Source isn't the only answer but is often the best one -- and what I have been pointing at in this thread is that to the greatest extent possible I avoid code I can't prove to be untainted, i.e. GPL or fully Open Sourced code that the community has already basically approved of. I think that this is probably the single most overlooked and important part of t

  • Sun Microsystems said, "The rise of the open-source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors"?! OK, I'm looking around, but I don't see Rod Serling anywhere....

    Joking aside, I guess it's a sign of things to come. Sun's dance with open source almost certainly presages the end of the behemoth proprietary software vendors. This makes sense, of course. Typical software that runs typical computers is now a commodity, downloadable for free over the Internet, and modifiable by all comers. The business wo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )
      Typical software that runs typical computers is now a commodity, downloadable for free over the Internet, and modifiable by all comers. The business world must adapt to this change, and re-define the software industry in terms of it, while finding a way to maintain their revenue streams.

      The OS and a few applications may be a commodity, however a lot of applications certainly aren't. Accounting and payroll are the first most obvious that spring to mind, though there are many others.

      That being said, very lar
    • It is a start, but it hardly makes a dent in the proprietary software world. I am at a university right now, and here is an abbreviated list of free vs. proprietary software in use: Free: Linux, Solaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, VNC, OpenSSH, GNU, GIMP Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE This list is a bit mislea

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ajs ( 35943 )

        It is a start, but it hardly makes a dent in the proprietary software world. I am at a university right now, and here is an abbreviated list of free vs. proprietary software in use:

        Free: Linux, Solaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, VNC, OpenSSH, GNU, GIMP

        Proprietary: Windows, Mac OS X, IE7, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, Citrix/Metaframe, MS Office, Microchip PIC software, Xilinx, Solid Edge, Visual Studio, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Apple i*, Oracle, PSPICE

        That's about what I'd expect. As proprietary software is edged out, it will be the plethora of specialized applications that hold on the longest. The list of software that you give encompasses thousands of programs, but you notice thaat you called out very few individual open source programs. That's because the open source equivalent of Oracle that comes free with Linux is just a commodity. The open source equivalent of Acrobat that comes for free with Linux is just a commodity. Many organizations don't ev

        • Yeah, I've noticed that. For example, Acrobat is installed on all the Linux machines, even though GNOME and KDE are also installed and each come with their own PDF functionality. Still, the problem as I see it is a lack of exposure to open source software -- the Linux computers are in a basement, and most people don't know they exist, and the Windows computers are conveniently located in the main library building, and I have seen other universities do the same thing.

  • See what Dave Hitz has to say (Score:3, Informative)

    by abalacha ( 56157 ) on Friday September 07, 2007 @10:30AM (#20507499) Journal
    Have a look at http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/litigoperatio n-.html [netapp.com] before jumping into any conclusions.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by canuck57 ( 662392 )

      The reality is NetApp is in trouble. Lets face it, 2TB of storage yesterday was big bucks. Today, it is 4 Seagate drives at Best Buy and fit in one PC. Cluster 4 dual AMD x2's together on 1000GB interconnects and it has never been cheaper to spin 8TB into your own appliance. Do it with Linux or Solaris. Or like NetApps, BSD.

      Same thing happened with SCO. Shrinking user base from competition and poor product maintenance. Too much money for Gocci shoes and not enough R&D. NetApp, good-bye.

      • Re:See what Dave Hitz has to say (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:39PM (#20509749) Homepage
        Stringing together something with bubblegum and duct tape is easy. Making that bubblegum and duct tape appear like a seamless storage cluster is another matter. This is what people (still) pay netapp for.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by lukas84 ( 912874 )
          Agreed. Also, Enterprise Storage needs performance. Having 2TB of databases on 4 (or 8) arms is going to be slow as molasses.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by igb ( 28052 )
          2TB is easy, but 2TB with decent performance is rather harder. 2TB with decent performance and good post-power-off performance is harder still. Back in the day, 2TB would be spread over 60 or more 7200rpm spindles, whereas today it's on half a dozen 7200rpm spindles. You've got the capacity, but you've got a tenth of the ops/sec. This might well not matter to you, if you're doing data warehousing or serving home directories, or it might be very important indeed if you're doing a lot of OLTP. NetApp st

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by drsmithy ( 35869 )

            2TB is easy, but 2TB with decent performance is rather harder. 2TB with decent performance and good post-power-off performance is harder still. Back in the day, 2TB would be spread over 60 or more 7200rpm spindles, whereas today it's on half a dozen 7200rpm spindles. You've got the capacity, but you've got a tenth of the ops/sec. This might well not matter to you, if you're doing data warehousing or serving home directories, or it might be very important indeed if you're doing a lot of OLTP. NetApp still h

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by igb ( 28052 )

              A lot of people lose sight of this, but there's no reason why if you need "only" 2TB, that you _buy_ only 2TB. There's no reason why a "2TB array" can't be 30*500G drives from which you only access the first ~130G and ignore the rest (as you say, storage is so cheap the "waste" is irrelevant).

              Power, space, heat, MTBF, complexity. I'm using some Pillar equipment that short-strokes SATA drives but makes the residue available at a lower QoS, which works well, but I can make use of the residual space. I'

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by drsmithy ( 35869 )

                Power, space, heat, MTBF, complexity.

                Huh ? How does 30 spindles of SATA involve any more of this than 30 spindles of FC, SCSI or SAS ? You *were* lamenting about the lack of spindles from defining your storage requirements by how much space and only getting the minimum number of drives to provide that, as I understood it.

                I'm using some Pillar equipment that short-strokes SATA drives but makes the residue available at a lower QoS, which works well, but I can make use of the residual space. I've done wh

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 )

        The reality is NetApp is in trouble. Lets face it, 2TB of storage yesterday was big bucks. Today, it is 4 Seagate drives at Best Buy and fit in one PC. Cluster 4 dual AMD x2's together on 1000GB interconnects and it has never been cheaper to spin 8TB into your own appliance. Do it with Linux or Solaris. Or like NetApps, BSD.

        You can build a storage solution with 90% of the functionality of enterprise-level kit like NetApp/EMC/Sun/IBM/etc with off the shelf parts, and for substantially less money. However,

  • Yet another IDG (ComputerWorld) story from and IDG shill in how many days? These arn't stories, they're ADVERTISING INSERTS.

    Looks like IDG (ComputerWorld, ITWorld, NetworkWorld...) is really hitting Slashdot HARD, either that or they have a deal with Slashdot. Here's a partial list of the shills that regularly show up and have almost 100% article acceptance rates: Lucas123 [slashdot.com]
    coondoggie [slashdot.com]
    inkslinger77 [slashdot.com]
    narramissic [slashdot.com]
    jcatcw [slashdot.com]

    Looks like they spread out the work over a few shill user accounts, which is to be e

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Bearhouse ( 1034238 )
      Dupe?

      http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=290119&cid=204 98825 [slashdot.org]

      But for once, an INTERESTING one. Keep up the good work, Frosty

    • Allow me to retort (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lucas123 ( 935744 ) on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:22PM (#20509385) Homepage
      First, I don't have anything approaching a 100% acceptance rate. The vast majority of my submissions are rejected, but you'd have to take the time to look at my profile to know what I've submitted. Second, I submit stories from lots of different news sites. Because I edit for Computerworld (and I'm open about my association what that 40-year-old pub -- it's my homepage) doesn't make me some sort of evil shill. I'm proud of my magazine and the reporters here. Why shouldn't I post what I consider the best and most appropriate stories around the web to be read? Who cares where a story comes from if it's good? I have to say, Slashdot is the most democratic news site around. Acceptance is totally based on whether the story is voted up by Slashdot readers through Firehose, unlike a site like Digg.com, which is based on how large a social network you create in order to garner votes.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Except that the editors still, ultimately, pick which stories they want. The firehose is just a suggestion.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kaffiene ( 38781 )
        Bullshit. The editors still pick what they want.

        A Democracy is what Slashdot *should* be.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gladish ( 982899 )
      I just realized that I'm reading something written by someone named Frosty Piss about two guys named coondoggie and inkslinger.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rhizome ( 115711 )
      I suppose that's their business, but one would hope that they are actually getting PAID for being part of IDG's advertising program. And of course there should be disclosure so that visitors to Slashdot realize they are reading advertisements and not an article submitted by a "real" user...

      What if it's IDG who is getting paid by Slashdot to provide content? Much more likely a scenario...
  • Open source usage of ZFS is no threat to NetApp as long as Sun persists in making the ZFS license incompatible with Linux.

    And given Schwartz's history of lies and misrepresentation related to open source, he really isn't the one to complain about this sort of thing.
    • "Open source usage of ZFS is no threat to NetApp as long as Sun persists in making the ZFS license incompatible with Linux."

      So what about Linux. If you want to build an Open Source storage appliance I think the way to go would be to run ZFS under BSD UNIX.

      I think NetApp is also worried about Apple. Apple has ported ZFS to Mac OS X and Apple does have some nice storage products that are cheaper than NetApp's. Wait 'till these run ZFS.

      • ``I think NetApp is also worried about Apple. '' Apple don't have the channel or service partners today. It would take them years to develop those, and the enterprise storage market is a scary place to learn those lessons. How would Apple offer 24x7 2hr engineer on site service? How would they convince their existing channel to get involved in what are often twelve-month sales cycles even for established kit?

        I'm an Auspex customer from back before NetApp even existed, and buying that (14GB! $200K!

        • Actually, don't neglect the convergence of the NAS and SAN markets. This puts Hitachi and IBM into the mix at tier 1 as well, along with players like LeftHand and EqualLogic as well. It's a very crowded space.

          Actually, I think the formerly-pure-play iSCSI providers like EqualLogic and LeftHand have the most interesting products, with "stackable" scalability that's diffucult to match with a dedicated controller topology. But their services organizations aren't yet there compared with the Tier-1 vendors. I sp

  • EMC says: Bye-Bye NetApp (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 07, 2007 @02:39PM (#20512023)
    I've read both Jonathan Schwartz's and David Hick's blogs, and yes, they both are trying to spin it their way, as would be expected.

    However keep in mind that NetApp started this. NetApp saying that Sun started this is incorrect, because that would be equating StorageTek with Sun. And if this were purely a StorageTek issue, then ZFS wouldn't be involved.

    So what really happened is NetApp is being damaged or fears being damaged from open source storage platforms, ZFS in particular, and they have decided to sue Sun. NetApp is rightly very concerned about a big backlash from bringing this kind of suit, so they are trying to confuse the issue as much as possible by saying that the fight goes back all the way to StorageTek.

    And I really believe Jonathan when he says in his blog that he was blind sided by NetApp on this. David Hitz is trying to paint a picture that Sun wouldn't return the NetApp lawyer's calls so NetApp had no recourse but to get their attention by sueing them. If Dave Hitz really wanted to get some traction on this with Sun, why didn't he call Jonathan himself. Had he done so, David Hitz would have said so in his blog.

    Once the community thinks about this, and realizes that if NetApp prevails, and kills ZFS, then the prospects for improvements in open-source file system technology will be greatly set back. I would expect an army of open source volunteers scrutinizing all of NetApp's patent claims, and trying to find prior art. Also a large number of open-source organization Amicus Curiae briefs, should this thing progress.

    I just don't think Sun is stupid enough to steal someone else's IP if they believe they didn't believe they had a reasonable chance of defending their actions in court. Time will tell though....

    Meanwhile, EMC must be delighted at the prospect of NetApp losing this thing. Bye-bye NetApp. But, they're probably furious though at NetApp for validating the concept that ZFS running on a commodity platform is a competitive storage platform. Because in the long run, EMC's storage business is just as much at risk as is NetApp's.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close