Today Sun filed counterclaims against the entirety of the Network Appliance product line, seeking both injunction and monetary damages. The claims are in response to the patent infringement lawsuit Network Appliance filed against Sun’s ZFS technology, an open source solution that is freely available in the marketplace. 

Sun believes in protecting innovation as well as embracing the open source community. We indemnify our customers and stand behind the innovations we deliver to the market. While Sun believes innovation works better than litigation, when efforts to settle outside of legal action proved ineffective, we had no choice other than to respond with a countersuit. A portion of the proceeds recovered will be dedicated to seed a venture fund promoting and protecting innovation in the open source community as well as to support non-profit causes working for patent reform and software freedom (for example, the PTO’s Peer to Patent initiative and the Software Freedom Law Center).

For more information on the response, visit Jonathan's blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan and our General Counsel Mike Dillon's blog at http://blogs.sun.com/dillon. You can view the filing on our site at www.sun.com/news and we have also created an Open Source Community Support page at www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs.

If you are interested in what prominent figures in the free software and open source community have to say about the case, check out:

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/oct/25/zfs/

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071025004033835

Sun Microsystems Appoints Jeff Bonwick as New Sun Fellow - Prestigious fellowship is most senior rank within Sun's engineering organization. Bonwick becomes the 14^th engineer in Sun's 25 year history to earn the fellowship.

Greg P. says it best:

"Jeff's technical leadership and innovative thinking have been evident in his significant intellectual contributions – most famously as chief architect for ZFS, a radically new approach to storage, and a key technology that brings customers to Solaris 10," said Greg Papadopoulos, executive vice president of research and development and chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems. “He's a key member of our team and I congratulate him on achieving this prestigious honor.”

For more information, please check out: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-06/sunflash.20070625.1.xml

Yesterday Hewlett-Packard reported a 51 percent jump in second-quarter profit.  That is good.  But what has gone under reported by most of the media is that HP continues to see declines in selling enterprise systems, with big iron server sales down seven percent.  Why?  Lack of demand for PA-RISC and Alpha systems, which HP is planning to EOL; checkout story from The Register.  H-P has stopped investing in its own processor architecture altogether, and is trying to steer customers to systems based on Intel's Itanium instead.  Customers aren't moving to Itanium-based systems at anywhere near the levels H-P and Intel predicted, and this lack of adoption really calls into question H-P's long-term viability in the enterprise space.  At the very least it will be interesting to watch what develops over the next few quarters.
Mark Richardson