Folks, I understand that Sun/Oracle has a number of patents on ZFS. I am wondering what are their major patents. 1. The fact that ZFS uses blocks at the lowest level? Any file system would use blocks. 2. The fact that ZFS offers compression? The compression algorithms themselves do not belong to ZFS. 3. Is it how ZFS does deduplication? What is so special about it? 4. Is it how ZFS creates snapshots? 5. Is it the fact that ZFS stripes data across different devices in a raid group? Most of the things appear to be too generic to be patented. Makes me wonder where exactly are their major patents? Thank you in advance for your enlightenment. Regards, Peter -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, Peter Taps wrote:> > Most of the things appear to be too generic to be patented. Makes me > wonder where exactly are their major patents?I am not a lawyer, but I see that you forgot to mention the 128 bits. Probably Sun got the jump on the rest of the industry by patenting the use of 128 bit values. Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Hi Peter, Common sense is probably not very useful when it comes to software patents. The level of scrutiny applied varies wildly depending on a number of obvious factors ( e.g. the high profile, and contested nature of a claim). As to your specific question, all the relevant patents, PTO and court filings are posted here: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/documents.jsp Best wishes, Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Taps" <no-reply at opensolaris.org> To: zfs-code at opensolaris.org Sent: Tuesday, March 8, 2011 5:44:41 PM Subject: [zfs-code] What is patented in ZFS? Folks, I understand that Sun/Oracle has a number of patents on ZFS. I am wondering what are their major patents. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-code/attachments/20110309/02991149/attachment.html>