I am not a patent attorney either but for what it's worth - many times a patent is sought solely to protect a company from being sued from another. So even though Hadoop is out there it could be the case that Google has no intent of suing anyone who uses it - they just wanted to protect themselves from someone else claiming it as their own and then suing Google. But yes, the patent system clearly has problems as you stated.
--- On Wed, 1/20/10, Edward Capriolo <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Edward Capriolo <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Google has obtained the patent over mapreduce > To: [email protected] > Date: Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 12:09 PM > 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. > >> > > >
