Interesting situation. I try to compare mapreduce to the camera. Let argue Google is Kodak, Apache is Polaroid, and MapReduce is a Camera. Imagine Kodak invented the camera privately, never sold it to anyone, but produced some document describing what a camera did.
Polaroid followed the document and produced a camera and sold it publicly. Kodak later patents a camera, even though no one outside of Kodak can confirm Kodak ever made a camera before Polaroid. Not saying that is what happened here, but google releasing the GFS pdf was a large factor in causing hadoop to happen. Personally, it seems like they gave away too much information before they had the patent. The patent system faces many problems including this 'back to the future' issue. Where it takes so long to get a patent no one can wait, by the time a patent is issued there are already multiple viable implementations of a patent. I am no patent layer or anything, but I notice the phrase "master process" all over the claims. Maybe if a piece of software (hadoop) had a "distributed process" that would be sufficient to say hadoop technology does not infringe on this patent. I think it would be interesting to look deeply at each claim and determine if hadoop could be designed to not infringe on these patents, to deal with what if scenarios. On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Ravi <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > I too read about that news. I don't think that it will be any problem. > However Google didn't invent the model. > > Thanks. > > On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Udaya Lakshmi <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi, >> As an user of hadoop, Is there anything to worry about Google obtaining >> the patent over mapreduce? >> >> Thanks. >> >
