The NetApp lawsuit. Apple wanted indemnification, and Sun/Oracle did not want to indemnify Apple.
At the time that NetApp filed its lawsuit I blogged about how ZFS was a straightforward evolution of BSD 4.4's log structured filesystem. I didn't know that to be the case historically, that is, I didn't know if Bonwick was inspired by LFS, but I showed how almost in every way ZFS was a simple evolution of LFS. I showed my blog to Jeff to see how he felt about it, and he didn't say much but he did acknowledge it. The point of that blog was to show that there was prior art and that NetApp's lawsuit was worthless. I pointed it out to Sun's general counsel, too.
While I was disappointed that NetApp sued, the ZFS team literally referenced NetApp and WAFL multiple times in their presenations IIRC. They were kind of begging to be sued.
The argument advanced in the piece isn't without merit -- that ripping out DTrace, if subsequent legal developments demanded it, would be a heck of a lot easier than removing a filesystem that would by then contain massive amounts of customer data.
And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.
cryptonector|10 months ago
At the time that NetApp filed its lawsuit I blogged about how ZFS was a straightforward evolution of BSD 4.4's log structured filesystem. I didn't know that to be the case historically, that is, I didn't know if Bonwick was inspired by LFS, but I showed how almost in every way ZFS was a simple evolution of LFS. I showed my blog to Jeff to see how he felt about it, and he didn't say much but he did acknowledge it. The point of that blog was to show that there was prior art and that NetApp's lawsuit was worthless. I pointed it out to Sun's general counsel, too.
tw04|10 months ago
Also, according to NetApp, "Sun started it".
https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/neta...
ethbr1|10 months ago
And given what a litigious jackass Larry Ellison / Oracle is, I can't fault Apple for being nervous.
cryptonector|10 months ago
mixmastamyk|10 months ago