A lot of the CoW patents, WAFL, snapshot patents that Network Appliance filed in the late 1990s have expired, or are expiring this year.
For example, https://www.google.com/patents/US6289356 was filed in 1998, so I presume it's expiring fairly soon. Given that some of the original lawsuits were Network Appliance suing Sun/Oracle, I'm wondering how much of a role this played in the timing of the release of these features? After all, Apple could pretty much pick a window to release a new file system - nothing special about 2016, that they couldn't have done this in 2015 or 2017...
Which makes me wonder if there are data integrity patents that will expire, and at such time, Apple can now drop the functionality into APFS. After all, they did say during their presentation, that the flexibility of the data format is one of the key design features of APFS.
6289356 also lists a "priority date" on the google page of 1993. If that is an actual "priority date" rather than a google metadata "add on" then this patent expired (absent any term extensions) on June 3, 2013.
For example, https://www.google.com/patents/US6289356 was filed in 1998, so I presume it's expiring fairly soon. Given that some of the original lawsuits were Network Appliance suing Sun/Oracle, I'm wondering how much of a role this played in the timing of the release of these features? After all, Apple could pretty much pick a window to release a new file system - nothing special about 2016, that they couldn't have done this in 2015 or 2017...
Which makes me wonder if there are data integrity patents that will expire, and at such time, Apple can now drop the functionality into APFS. After all, they did say during their presentation, that the flexibility of the data format is one of the key design features of APFS.