[ahl]

Seems specious. Patents don't preclude one from overtly trying to compete; they protect specific mechanisms. In this case either ZFS didn't use the same mechanisms or the mechanisms themselves were found to have prior art.

[tw04]

Whether the claims were valid or not I guess we'll never know given Oracle and NetApp decided to settle.

What I DO knows is that if the non-infringement were as open and shut as you and Bryan are suggesting, Apple probably wouldn't have scrapped years of effort and likely millions in R&D for no reason. It's not like they couldn't afford some lawyers to defend a frivelous lawsuit...

[ahl]

Maybe! Bryan and I were pretty close to the case and to the implementation of ZFS. But maybe Apple did detect some smoking gun of which somehow we were unaware. I (still) think Jonathan’s preannouncement was the catalyst for Apple changing direction.

[cryptonector]

There was lots of prior art from the 80s for "write anywhere", which is a generally a consequence of copy-on-write on-disk formats. The write-anywhere thing is not really what's interesting, but, rather, not having to commit to some number of inodes at newfs time. Sun talking about NetApp makes sense given that they were the competition.

We don't know exactly what happened with Apple and Sun, but there were lots of indicia that Apple wanted indemnification and Sun was unwilling to go there. Why Apple really insisted on that, I don't know -- I think they should have been able to do the prior art search and know that NetApp probably wouldn't win their lawsuits, but hey, lawsuits are a somewhat random function and I guess Apple didn't want NetApp holding them by the short ones. DTrace they could remove, but removing ZFS once they were reliant on it would be much much harder.