[Note: This is an e-mail that I sent
internally to our employees, with the expectation that they might also share it with customers. Some of it repeats previous posts, but other parts
are different. In the spirit of openness, I decided to post here as well.]
To: everyone-at-netapp
Subject: Sun's Lawsuit Against NetApp
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! It seems designed to make NetApp
employees wonder, Do I still have a job?
And customers to wonder, Is it safe to
buy NetApp products?
I’d like to
reassure you. Your job is safe. Our products are all still for sale.
Can you ever
remember a Fortune 1000 company being shut down by patents? It just doesn’t
happen! Even for the RIM/Blackberry case, which is the closest I can think of
to a big company being shut down, it took years and years to get to that point,
and was still averted in the end. I think it’s safe to say the odds of Sun fulfilling
their threat are near zero.
If you are a
customer, you can be confident buying NetApp products.
If you are an
employee, just keep doing your job! Even if your job is to partner with Sun, keep
doing your job. Here’s a ironic story. When James and I received the IEEE
Storage Systems Award for our work in WAFL and appliances “which has
revolutionized storage”, it was a Sun employee who organized the session where
the award was presented. He was friendly, we were friendly, and we didn’t talk
about the lawsuit. You can do it too. The first minute or two might feel odd,
but then you’ll get over it. We have many joint customers to take care of.
If you are a
salesman with concerned customers, feel free to show them this note, and maybe
also point them at a couple of my blog posts (here and here). But
don’t waste too much time before getting back to how we can work with them to
solve their storage and data management problems.
I am frustrated
with Sun and with Jonathan, as I describe in this blog entry.
We have tried to be very open, detailed and specific about how Sun is
infringing our intellectual property. We’ve tried to set a higher standard in
how companies conduct patent litigation. It’s frustrating that Sun would just
do a two-barreled blast, threatening to shut down our company. Frustrating and
silly, to be honest, because it’s just so unlikely for a patent case to shut
down a major corporation.
The other thing
that’s frustrating is the way Jonathan wraps himself in the open source flag.
We aren’t against open source, and we aren’t even against non-commercial use of
ZFS. 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.

