Re: License for Google's patent
mail-archives.apache.org
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We should be happy that google grants a license for something they shouldn't have had a patent on in the first place?
Continued generosity indeed.
Given that patents are a way of live in the US, why wouldn't Google patent this ? Would you prefer someone else instead ?
On a related note -- how many patents does the Apache Foundation own ?
I mean I'm as against software patents as the next guy but this isn't the most trivial one I've seen. Glad they licensed it to ASF.
Adding all kinds of bells and whistles to it does not make it 'novel'.
Redundancy, failover, node locality and rack locality have all been done many times over in the past, maybe not in that context but that is just a combining of concepts.
To be awarded a patent you should at least do something original.
Putting that aside, what Google did with MapReduce was original. There are a number of challenges that each of the individual concepts never had to overcome, which required new, unique concepts to be introduced to make the system work.
Only if the mechanism is novel. And that's the problem here, the mechanism is identical, just larger.
Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all. There are just countless implementation details to be taken care of, but any competent programmer could extend the original concept of map/reduce to that level.
It very much changes the fundamental method. It takes something that was once impossible given all existing techniques and technologies, and makes it possible. The new techniques and technologies are at the core of the patent.
any competent programmer could extend the original concept of map/reduce to that level.
Patently false. At the very least, you need a decent sized team of very competent programmers, DBAs, and system administrators to architect and build the system, and another programming test team to ensure that it is reliable. And then you'd only have a working prototype. This isn't nearly as trivial as you make it out to be. Hadoop is evidence of that, it's going on 4 years and four thousand changesets, with changes by over 50 people from Apache, Yahoo! and the general public. Its source directory (for only the common project, not including the HDFS) clocks in at 328 KLOC.
MapReduce wasn't some little side project hack-job.
But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you?
Thanks for playing.
>Only if the mechanism is novel.
Actually, no. It's perfectly reasonable to patent using old mechanisms to do new things or to do old things differently.
For example, appropriate to patent using a lever to do something that no one had thought to do with a lever before, despite the fact that levers are one of the oldest mechanisms.
Note that new mechanisms don't come along very often. Much of what we get are new uses or new applications.
I already said I'm against software patents -- but this is one of the worse cases to back up the viewpoint, they actually invent something here.
The first time someone did map/reduce, the first time someone did quicksort, that was invention. Doing it larger or through some other variation does not make it an invention.
Anyway, you seem to be set on your position that they invented something, I really think they didn't. Map/Reduce to me is actually a poster child for a very bad software patent.
I'll admit that it's a fuzzy line and you can make a case for this particular thing to be on either side of it -- but having components that are previously established isn't enough IMO to definitively say "nothing was invented".
cat somefile.txt | grep sometext | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | wc
Is technically in violation of the map reduce patent, it is that broad.
Go read the thing, seriously it is very interesting reading.
The meat is this section:
"A large-scale data processing system and method includes one or more application-independent map modules configured to read input data and to apply at least one application-specific map operation to the input data to produce intermediate data values, wherein the map operation is automatically parallelized across multiple processors in the parallel processing environment. A plurality of intermediate data structures are used to store the intermediate data values. One or more application-independent reduce modules are configured to retrieve the intermediate data values and to apply at least one application-specific reduce operation to the intermediate data values to provide output data."
I'm just saying that what they've implemented is qualitatively different and an invention compared to your clever shellscripting, even though you can call them "sort of the same thing" from a sufficiently philosophical point of view.
Or as they say, don't hate the player, hate the game.
I expressly did not do that because to me it was an obvious extension of being able to do 'stills'. After all, simply making it move does not require much ingenuity, merely a couple of nights of hard work.
Looking back I'm happy I didn't do that. I refused to 'play the game', even if it could have made me a boatload of money I still stand by that decision.
Whether google is a multinational or a one man shop, to apply for a patent simply because of scaling an existing algorithm up to 'cluster size' in my opinion is not the nicest thing. For them to 'grant' licenses like these and then to receive the kind of groveling gratitude present in that email in return is really disgusting.
In fact, a company called Acacia tried just that. When they found out the parent company was European they lost interest.
We don't have the equivalent of an 'eastern Texas district', where the courts are favorably impressed by anything that carries a patent office stamp.
Going along with wrongdoing, just because that's the way you make it in this world, is a reasonable strategy, sure. But when things are bad enough there is a time for ethical players to sacrifice for a greater purpose.
Each person, including board members and executives, is responsible for the ethics of their own actions and inaction. The "everyone was doing it" argument doesn't hold all that much water when it comes down to it. Everyone is doing a lot of things that I still must make a sacrifice of some sort to choose not to do due to ethics. My decisions are about who I am, not about who they are.
The most appropriate, ethical, behavior is to pursue patents within the current system while simultaneously working towards a better system whereby those patents would be deemed invalid. After all, this puts you in the position to give away the patents you've been granted for free, as Google has, if you truly feel they should not have been given to you in the first place.
Most - if not all - software patents are bogus.
Many years ago I saw a lawyer say that he had examined a random sample of IBM's software patents, and estimated that about 70% of them wouldn't stand up in court. And it was his belief that IBM had better patents than most companies out there. The problem was, of course, that if they drop a stack of 15 patents on you neither you nor they know what they will get to stick, but they will definitely get you with something.
And why not file those patents? Their main purpose is to be an unused threat, and they are threatening whether or not they are used.
Therefore even by the very relaxed standards the that US legal system does, most software patents are bogus. If you hold a higher intellectual standard, then it isn't hard for that 70% to become 100%, or close enough to it to make the exceptions negligible.
(There is hope that Bilski will restore some sanity to the US system.)
I'm sure there is good will here, but the system is disgusting.