Hi Andry, Bruce,
It's a fair argument that Hadoop mapreduce is a Google MapReduce clone --
which
has been extended in several directions by the community, of course. Given
that,
and the in my personal experience substantial commercial application of
the
technology already, clearly the success story has already spread far
beyond any
reasonable definition of "academic".
Absolutely true. I am the proof of this :-) It turns out that I am a BIG FAN
of both
Hadoop and Hbase and I have a true willingness to use them in a real
business ... and
as soon as this business develops commit development resources to it. So I
am not
questioning the value of the work because I know this is great work and I
know the
adoption is going to be huge.
I am also of the opinion that this is a defensive move by Google. It would
be in
direct opposition to years of experience we have with this company should
they
go after the ASF in any way.
I tend to agree (and with Bruce as well). Still from a business perspective
this is a risk
and I hate risks :-(
Furthermore, I'm not a patent lawyer, but I believe for the HBase case,
that
HBase (and HDFS) are not covered by these patents, except for the
mapreduce
integration package, which could be dropped without any loss of HBase
functionality for clients using the HBase client API. So the direct impact
on
HBase for some worst-case scenario would be low as far as I can see.
Unfortunately when you use HBase this is because you have to process large
amount of data
which means that by nature many of the HBase adopters are ALSO hadoop
adopters.
But thank you for your comment because somehow it helps understand the
degree at which
we would be impacted if Google wanted to enforce its intellectual property.
Thanks Andy and Bruce, somehow the discussion helped.
Laurence
----- Original Message ----From: Laurence Hubert <
[email protected]>
To:
[email protected]Sent: Thu, January 21, 2010 7:33:29 PM
Subject: Re: Google patent over Map Reduce - Hbase reflections
Dear all,
I think the impact of this patent should not be underestimated. If
Hadoop/HBase
is only an educational system and not used by anybody for any business
then I
agree there is no threat to the community...
but if companies are relaying on it to do business (and some started to
evaluate
the use of Hadoop/HBase in commercial systems) then the companies
businesses or
products might be threatened. This means, unless something is done,
companies
cannot select Hadoop/HBase anymore for implementations because this is too
much
of a risk... which is in fact the biggest threat to hadoop... it was
becoming
popular and companies started to consider supporting it (providing
development
resources...) because this was a possible platform for their businesses...
In my opinion a healthy attitude to this would be to analyse what was
actually
*really* protected and be creative on how hadoop could/should
differentiate.
Because if hadoop is just a 1:1 replica of the Google system, then there
is no
chance that it will attract more than the academic community and its nice
success story is going to end here... I see enough intellectual power in
the
team to be able to take the Google patent and produce the next
generation...
My two cents,
Laurence Hubert
----- Original Message ----- From: "Kay Kay"
To:
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 3:28 AM
Subject: Re: Google patent over Map Reduce - Hbase reflections
On 1/20/10 3:44 PM, stack wrote:
I've been following the thread. I would tend to side with the general
tenor
that has it that its likely a just-in-case move by Google and that the
likelihood of a Google suing Apache is not likely to happen in this
dimension.
That was my general idea as well.
Are you (or your employer) spooked Kay Kay?
Not at all - but just started this to see what the opinions of the
community might be w.r.t. this.
St.Ack
On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Kay Kay wrote:
A big thread currently going on at the hadoop common user mailing
list -
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hadoop-common-user/201001.mbox/<2
[email protected]> .
A good number of you might have already seen that thread, but just
opening
up a thread for discussion to see what the thoughts of the community
are ,
w.r.t. patent and how much (if at all) of the application would be
related
to that / any refactorings as necessary as seen by the team or
thoughts in
general to the same.
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