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If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. And it's still a mousetrap. Combining a bunch of existing concepts in a new way is the basis for the pate

by tghw 17y ago

If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. And it's still a mousetrap. Combining a bunch of existing concepts in a new way is the basis for the patent system. It's the only way to progress: iteration. 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.

jacquesm 17y ago
> If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. 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.
- anamax 17y ago
  > > If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. >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.
- tghw 17y ago
  Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all. 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?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you? Thanks for playing.

by tghw 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

> If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. 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.

anamax 17y ago
> > If someone builds a better mousetrap, it's patentable. >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.
tghw 17y ago
Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all. 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?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you? Thanks for playing.