A moment of quiet and two bits of news last week following the flurry of announcements at VMworld.
On Thursday last week, Oracle and NetApp announced that they have settled their lawsuits against each other over the open-source ZFS. Neither company disclosed the terms of the agreement and both said that they would collaborate on technology in the future.
NetApp sued Sun for patent infringement in 2007; Oracle, who acquired Sun, retaliated with a lawsuit of its own.
Caught up in the maelstrom was tiny start-up Coraid, who introduced technology that used ZFS. The company upon hearing from NetApp’s lawyers in July about patent infringement, withdrew its product from the market.
Now, it appears that with the Oracle/NetApp brouhaha settled, that Nexenta, Compellent, GreenBytes and Coraid will be free to use ZFS in their products. Anyway, that’s what everyone hopes.
But that isn’t the end of lawsuits for Oracle. After hiring and installing ex-HP head Mark Hurd as co-president early last week, HP sued Oracle and Hurd. The company said in its complaint that Hurd had signed several nondisclosure agreements with HP and that he would not be able to perform his job at Oracle without violating them.
Oracle’s Ellison responded to the suit, calling it ‘vindictive’ and saying it would be difficult for the two companies to work together.
Meanwhile, Hurd is expected to keynote at Oracle OpenWorld on Sept. 20. So is Ann Livermore, HP executive vice president, speaking there a day ahead on the 19th.
