Oracle releases Solaris 10 U9 with ZFS v22 without dedup

[Matt Olander]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 09:54:48PM +0200, Martin Matuska wrote:
>> Of course without sources.
>>
>> And more news, Netapp and Oracle have agreed to dismiss lawsuits.
>>
>> http://www.netapp.com/us/company/news/news-rel-20100909-oracle-settlement.html
>>
>> The question is, why is Solaris 10 U9 without deduplication? If this has
>> something to do with the agreement, one possibility is that they agreed
>> deduplication may only be in Oracle Storage Appliances and Oracle will
>> honor their patent.
>>
>> That would mean for us: no deduplication, or anybody using or selling it
>> without paying a royalty to netapp can go to court
>>
>> But that is just a speculation as there is no more information available.
>>
>> Anyway, it is better to be cautious than to end like Coraid.
>
> My understanding is very different. I was under impression that NetApp
> cannot go after people using OpenSolaris until they win in court. Before
> that every OpenSolaris code consumer is protected by CDDL. NetApp didn't
> win, right?
>
> Also:
>
> "both parties have agreed to dismiss their pending patent litigation"
>
> My English might not be enough here, but my reading is that because patent
> litigation was dismissed, NetApp no longer claims (in legal sense) that
> Oracle violates NetApp's patents via OpenSolaris. Is my reading correct
> or not?

Yes, this is also how I interpreted it. Coraid backed down selling an
appliance that was not theirs (Nexenta on Supermicro) based on a
simple cease & desist letter. They are a very small company and would
rather back down than face any kind of possible legal action. In fact,
Nexenta (the more appropriate target) never received the letter.
Either way, both parties dismissed their claims.

-matt