Google isn't the only one leaping to the defense of Hadoop, the open source software that underpins so many of the biggest names on the internet.
The Texas-based cloud computing outfit Rackspace just launched a very public attack against a company that has made a habit of suing web giants over their use of Hadoop. Parallel Iron -- a shell company incorporated in Delaware -- has sued everyone from Rackspace to Facebook to LinkedIn, claiming their Hadoop installations infringe on three of its patents, and on Thursday, Rackspace took to the web to announce a kind of counter suit against Parallel Iron, calling the company "the most notorious patent troll in America."
The move comes a week after Google -- which owns many of its own patents related to Hadoop -- vowed not to use at least some of these patents against the open source platform and called on others to erect additional "patent shields" around the technology, hoping to protect this fundamental software from "trolls," companies that exist solely to make money through patent infringement suits.
"There's a been proliferation of these patent troll lawsuits, and it has reached epidemic proportions," Rackspace general counsel Alan Schoenbaum tells Wired. "We're all searching for ways to reduce it. We'd love to end it -- but I don't know if that's possible."
Hadoop is a way of crunching massive amounts of data using hundreds of even thousands of ordinary computer servers. It was originally developed by Yahoo and Facebook and so many others, but it's based on research papers published by Google a decade ago.
Since last summer, Parallel Iron has filed over 23 lawsuits against companies over their use of the Hadoop File System, or HDFS, the means of storing data on the platform. Just last week, it filed suit against Rackspace and eleven others.
Rackspace has now sued the company back, claiming that Parallel Iron is tied to an outfit called IP Nav, which approached Rackspace in December 2010 with claims of patent infringement. According to Schoenbaum, IP Nav told Rackspace it was operating on behalf of an unnamed patent holder and that it wouldn't divulge the identity of the patent holder unless Rackspace entered a "forbearance agreement" that prevented the cloud giant from suing over the matter. Rackspace declined, but the two companies did enter an agreement that barred both of them from suing without proper notice.
The claim from Rackspace is that because Parallel Iron and IP Nav are tied together, Parallel Iron broke the forbearance agreement in filing suit against Rackspace last week. Rackspace is asking the court to award damages for breach of contract, and to provide a declaratory judgment that the cloud outfit does not infringe Parallel Iron’s patents. Richard Kirk, one of the attorneys working for Parallel Iron, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yes, Rackspace is defending its own turf. But Schoenbaum is also trying rally the rest of the web. "Today we drove a stake into the ground," he said in a blog post trumpeting the suit.
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