The software patent situation is getting more and more ridiculous by the day. This patent is so general, it describes basically any data-mining software (that may or may not be distributed over multiple computers.)<p>I think that all patents should have to go through the peer review process, unless there is some kind of extra-ordinary reason that it can't be made public:<p><a href="http://www.peertopatent.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.peertopatent.org/</a>
You can't patent something that has been publicly disclosed, including disclosure by yourself. Commercial use counts as disclosure.<p>This was filed June 18, 2004, so given the one year grace allowed under US law, if Google made <i>commercial use</i> of this system before June 18, 2003, then they cannot patent it.<p>I'm pretty sure Google used distributed map-reduce from the beginning... so I'm thinking that this patent must cover a refined method that differs in some way from their initial approach.<p>It's a lot of work to read and understand a patent (I spent a couple of days on one this week), so if anyone else wants to do so and let us know what the patented algorithm actually is...
Even if they wanted to enforce it they'd have to prove it.<p>Otherwise patenting map reduce - which is practically one of the foundations of functional data processing - is down right silly