Google Inc. (GOOG) Issues Its Own Patent Armistice … Will Others Follow?

Published on March 28, 2013 at 2:16 pm by David Woodburn in News

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been known as a pioneer and proponent of open source technology, the tech that can be easily manipulated, shared and used by many companies for varying purposes – but mostly, to allow for connection and collaboration across many devices and tearing down barriers to open communications that might exist when companies have proprietary source code only for their devices and cannot integrate with others.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is one of the original copanies to develop Hadoop, the open-source software platform that is the basis for Big Data analysis and compilation across hundreds or thousands of data servers. One of the platforms Google developed inside the data-processing infrastructure is someting called MapReduce, of which several companies – including Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), have been developing their own versions through open-source coding.

But the challenge, even with open source, is the risk of patent lawsuits. And Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) owns several open-source patents thanks to its work on MapReduce and to a a greater extent, Hadoop. However, the company did finally come out this week with an official declaration that it would not pursue any patent assertions regarding any open-source tech patents unless the company’s patents are challenged first. Google is not the first to introduce such an armistice, if you will – Twitter put forth a similar agreement last year – but as Google is perhaps the largest known tech company to have such an agreement on the books, it is likely the company to carry the banner of advocating for fewer patent lawsuits by having more openness and sharing of certain technologies and not going after infringers of patents that are based on open-source.

What to you think of this agreement? Can Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) be a leader and catalyst in this movement, or do you think this will ultimately help lessen the patent battles that are so prevalent around the world? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.