You may have read in News Picks recently that Sun won a partial stay in the NetApp patent lawsuit over ZFS, according to IP Law 360:A judge has partly stayed software company Network Appliance Inc.'s patent lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems Inc. over Sun's ZFS technology, pending the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's re-examination of one of the patents in the suit.

Now I may just be showing my geek side a bit here, but file systems are awesome. Aside from the fact our machines would be nothing without them, the science behind them is frequently ingenious. And ZFS (the Zettabyte File System) is no different. It has quite an extensive feature set just like its peers, but builds on this by adding a new layer of simplicity.

"Despite what you suggest, we love where the FSF's GPL3 is headed. For a variety of mechanical reasons, GPL2 is harder for us with OpenSolaris - but not impossible, or even out of the question. This has nothing to do with being afraid of the community (if it was, we wouldn't be so interested in seeing ZFS everywhere, including Linux, with full patent indemnity)."