According to Dave Hitz:
"This morning, Sun filed suit seeking a “permanent injunction against NetApp” to remove almost all of our products from the market place. That’s some pretty scary language!"
Yep, Dave ... it does sound scary and it also seems to be a response by Sun to NetApp's previous attempts to sue.
As Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun, puts it:
"One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies."
So NetApp seems a tad annoyed at ZFS which is being used by Sun, the open source community and also included in Leopard OSX. That's competition for you.
However, the bit that really makes me pay attention is this:
"The number one rule of open source is that you should only give away stuff that belongs to you. That is what this suit is about, and everything else is just fluff."
Is this another SCO in the making? Another company gearing up to have a pop at the open source community because of fears in its own market space, only to then promptly dive into the dustbin of history?
A quick bit of sniffing around and hey presto .... "NetApp Increases Commitment to Microsoft Products" ... is there a connection?
This is the time to start thinking about whether you have any second sourcing options available.
