On May 20, 2008, at 03:09, Erik Trimble wrote: > That is, the ZFS on-disk format isn't IP protected, and the general > concepts of how ZFS works (pools, CoW, snapshots, etc) are open, > it's just _how_ the guts do these things which are.
I'm also in the decidedly-not-a-lawyer camp too, but when I went and looked one time (at less than half of the patents - does anybody have a public list?) I think I saw things like on-disk file-tree representation, zero-fill and sparse file storage formats, multiple copies, extended attributes storage, the way you make snapshots, the way you express filesystems and pools hierarchically, the specific way write intents have to be done in ZFS - stuff like that. Again, being neither a lawyer nor a ZFS dev, I came away thinking it might be possible to make a read-only version that would be OK, or if maybe a handful of the patents didn't issue perhaps a low-performance version without some of the features. But then nobody would want to do a thing like that. :) Everything I've read from Sun folk indicates they'd like to see ZFS become ubiquitous, so I'm sure they're going to figure something out sooner or later. It's worth remembering that some people are still waiting for what they consider essential features, so we're really early in the game here, and if we're still in the Cathedral stage, the status quo may be the best bet for now. -Bill ----- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
