>> Personally, it seems like they gave away too much information before they had the patent.
I'm not a patent lawyer, but I'd expect they submitted the patent application or a provisional before they submitted their academic paper or other public disclosure. On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 12:09 PM, Edward Capriolo <[email protected]>wrote: > 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. > >> > > >
