Hmmm ... perhaps a different route to calm this religious discussion? Instead of trying to change NetApp's business model and force its hardware to go somewhere where it might not want to go at this time, you could instead take a look at Free NAS, a project that's been going for almost a year now. It's at http://www.freenas.org/

According to the project docs, their server supports "CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key." 

I spoke with the programmers last summer and they've made a lot of progress. 

David Morgenstern
eWEEK contributing editor

On Apr 9, 2007, at 10:23 AM, <linux4ever@hushmail.com> <linux4ever@hushmail.com> wrote:

to use anything but 100% open source in the enterprise is a moral 
crime.  no company should pay money for closed source evil 
platforms that do not strive to increase the common good.  plus 
linux outperforms just about anything on the market when you do it 
right.

why would we want to support microsoft or companies that engage in 

the killing of third world people and put profits in front of 
mankind?

we dont want a linux server just a nice appliance that we can put 
linux on and use proven technologies like ext3 or reiserfs and 
serve up our open source content.  i strongly doubt WAFFLE is as 
robust or fast as similar linux raid filesystems.

perhaps if netapp switched to linux they could also help the 
environment and help companies too but i dont know much about if 
they care about the people