Pinging this question. Is there anyone who can propose a way to tackle
this problem? Am I as PMC member in a position to contact Stanford and
just ask about that patent issue? Id like to give it a try although it
seems not very promising.
--sebastian
On 22.06.2011 19:04, Sebastian Schelter wrote:
Hello,b
this is Sebastian from the PMC of Apache Mahout writing. We received a
contribution that includes an implementation of Google's famous PageRank
algorithm (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAHOUT-742 ).
We'd love to include this in Mahout, yet we know that the University of
Stanford is holding a patent on PageRank (
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6285999 ). It seems that this patent
is not enforced because there are a lot of PageRank implementations
already available on the internet.
However we'd like to get clarification on whether we are allowed to
include this implementation in Mahout.
I already contacted Prof. Garcia-Molina from Stanford's Departments of
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering asking for advice who
helpfully suggested to contact Deputy General Counsel Thomas W. Fenner
(tfenner [at] stanford.edu) to clarify the legal issues.
This is my first time working on a legal issue regarding Apache, what is
the process and what do I have to do to get clarification?
Thank you,
Sebastian
