Mommy! Mommy! Ziya stole my cheese! Make him give it back!

Great stuff from Mellor and Pearson (and an especially En-Borged Tick) this week on who ripped of whom.

I gotta laugh and shudder at the same time.

I learned my lesson about accusing BigCo of ripping off ideas the WAY hard way. It was years ago, but I am still not talking.

Lawyers? Kids...it ain't the lawyers that you need to worry about when you start pokin' that stick in that eye...

(Really, I promise, never again...I was only kidding...OpenWide? all yours...really? those 200 visits from your engineering team? hell, we were just talking about the weather...really...any semblance of resemblance? totally just a little co-ink-ee-dink....totally...I swear on my mother's grave! you never even took a cup of coffee with asking please...it was all yours...I swear...please...I have kids, a wife...)

But the good folks at IBM are nice (see?) and HDS is gentlemanly (gentlepeoplely?), so there is no need for personal bodyguards down there in Fort Lauderdale...just yet. But, honestly, Geo and Co, baaaaddddd idea. really. really. bad. trust me on this...

That's the shudder.

The funny is that Datacore rose a phoenix from the ashes of Encore – very similar block virtualization technology concepts and almost the same core engineering team – same Fort Lauderdale location, same naming convention. One real difference is that Encore had tried to sell the virtualization technology as a big honking hardware box with its own disks and failed.

Encore was sold to SUN for around $150M in the mid 90s. (I wanted to buy it at DEC, but we could only come up with a justification for $30m) Sun tried to sell the big honking box – the 7000 series? – but failed, so it turned out a good thing we didn't buy it after all...

What a twisted tail-eating snake! – the original Encore virtualization ideas (from Ziya, et al) were sold to Sun and lost or buried there, independently reborn again as software (from Ziya, et al) at Datacore, used by HDS as a model (not reverse engineered or stolen, but more likely modeled and learned from) to create products which HDS now OEMs back to SUN…

Now if we could just get HP to OEM SVC from IBM it might cause a breech in the matter/anti-matter quantum barrier field reversing the time/energy continuum flow, and maybe even slow down global warming...

Gawd, I love the storage business….