Legal Question about Amber Road

Someone asked me the other day whether our patent infringement claims against Sun (see here, here, and here) include Sun’s “Amber Road” storage system. I said "Of course!" Commercial products that use ZFS are exactly the point of our lawsuit. Sun likes to portray this as a dispute about open source, and ZFS being open source does complicate things, but the reality is that this lawsuit is about Sun building and shipping products based on our intellectual property. At this point, we have sixteen patents that—we believe—ZFS infringes on. So naturally, the case we are making applies to any product from Sun (or any other company) that is based on ZFS, including Amber Road.

Comments

[Dave Lightman]

Does that count of sixteen patents include the three that the patent office rejected (6,857,001, 6,892,211, and 5,819,292)?

[Paul Mell]

Dave, there's a reason customers are putting you on the "contain" vendor list - your pricing is painful, your technology is no longer unique or valuable. Just look at examples like this:

http://blog.iweb.com/en/2008/12/iweb-acquires-the-sun-storage-7410-for-its-storage-area-network/1557.html

Customers are saving millions by leaving you behind, why can't you simply compete, instead of resorting to spurious litigation! You are humiliating your user base and your employees. Sun never sued Linux, despite the obvious competition: why are you suing them???????

[Mike]

Dave,
Please keep up the cause of selling integrated simple to manage storage appliances. I don't want to have to start up again on yet another dissimilar Sun storage product line only to find that Sun has dropped it 2 years later.

I've given up on any track record of consistency from Sun (except for Solaris).

Likewise, everything other storage vendor seems to offer piecemeal functionality to what NetApp offers.

Keep my job easy.

[Dave]

Um, Paul? How, exactly do you go about "suing Linux"?