Google has stepped up and made a move that might relieve the tech world from the intensity of the patent war. Last Thursday Google announced a patent pledge in which it will donate 10 patents related to cloud computing and big data that will protect the industry companies from patent law-suits.
10 patents donated to the open source software by Google are aimed to prevent the escalation of the patent war like the one that happened to the mobile industry. The pledge promises developers a free use of the technologies described in the patents without fear of the future law-suits. However, the pledge is valid only for the open-source software.
The goal of freeing the patents is to allow software engineers to build up upon each other's work that promotes innovation. Licenses, like GPL, General Purpose License allows anyone the right under the copyright law to use the designated blocks of software.
Google released the patents under Mapreduce, the technology that revolutionized the era of big data and cloud computing, and allowed production of new related services. Relentless patent war, that happened in the mobile industry and prevented the spread of new technologies and increased the prices for consumers, should be anticipated by non-aggression tactics, started by Google. Google hopes that its strategy will encourage other companies stop rigorous litigation activities and make the tech world more collaborative.
However, the "patent pledge" announced by Google doesn't help fighting against the trolls, non-operating companies. The only goal of them is to get the financial gain through patent litigation processes. Google mentioned that it will file law-suits against such companies.
The importance of patents is likely to be overstated, and only fosters aggressive competition in the tech world. Google has the power to support a more collaborative environment and reduce the tension of the existing patent war by the pledge it made.
Original Article at Gigaom
While I think Google's publicly stated intentions are noble, someone else who also read this article mentioned that this may just be a PR stunt, and I am inclined to agree with them. Google has over 17,000 patents and they only pledged 10 that could help prevent litigation; perhaps I am naive, but if Google was trying to genuinely stem litigation over data services, they seem like the one company that should have hundreds of patents within that space. However to be fair, they must still remain competitive, so perhaps 10 patents is a large amount to contribute.
ReplyDeleteI read this and also wrote about this news too! I thought it was pretty cool of Google to do, especially since one of the 10 patents they're including is a big parallelizing mapreduce one, so that's always a bonus for developers!
ReplyDeleteThis is great. Great find. It is interesting that Google is doing this, I wonder if it will continue. I would keep in mind that Google still owns the huge patent assets of Motorola, the main reasons for the acquisition.
ReplyDeleteGoogle makes plenty of money from adds, I don't think they really want to sue anyone. They seem content as long as we use their products. "Google claims these patents are already in wide use and that it will eventually expand the set of Google-owned patents that fall under the pledge." I expect them to continue adding any patents they think won't hurt them in the long run. I assume they are starting small to see what happens, who uses them and how. If I had a ton of patents, I wouldn't want to start by putting all my patents in, just in case someone figures out a way to hurt me by using them. Seems better to start with a few, make sure it works okay and go from there.
ReplyDeleteI also made a post about this, feel Google is trying to do a noble thing. The fact they picked 10 patents seems like a reasonable goal.
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