Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by natebc 43 days ago
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp.

source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
2 comments
throw0101c 43 days ago
Oracle and NetApp 'mutually dismissed' in 2010:

* https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2010/09/09/oracle-and-n...

* https://www.computerworld.com/article/1585889/opinion-patent...

NetApp originally sued then-independent Sun in 2007, and Sun counter-sued.

Free/TrueNAS/iXsystems has been offering ZFS-based solutions for many years now, and I haven't heard NetApp going after them:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNAS

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXsystems

link
natebc 43 days ago
I remember all this too. The time period that I was in this scene was AFTER 2010 though so who knows. As mentioned in response to the sibling "credible sources" bro, I was just a lowly support engineer so i had to trust that the CEO wasn't lying to us about all this.

Maybe he was ... they do that sometimes.

I looked around a little. the C&D from Netapp was in ~July 2010 and the partnership and product with Oracle in the Fall (Around the cease fire) and we continued with that (via the Oracle Partnership) through 2011-2015 when the company ran out of cash and laid us all off.

link
bzmrgonz 43 days ago
Do we add this corp. body count to Oracle then? I'm pretty sure that Oracle partnership wasn't cheap.
link
natebc 43 days ago
Who knows. I'm sure it was pretty expensive. Was certainly more comfortable on that side of their legal desk though I'm sure.
link
smartbit 43 days ago
only threats, no court cases or journalist writing about ZFS indemnification? IOW please provide links to credible sources.
link
natebc 43 days ago
sorry, don't have a link to the CEO telling us that we were signing a partnership with oracle that included the indemnification.

I was just a lowly support engineer so not privy to all the legal details that the executives were dealing with. I too had to just take them at their word.

ETA: I searched a bit. Here's a link

https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/networking/netapp-thr...

Maybe threats were enough? I certainly wouldn't want to test it myself.

link