I’ve posted on MapReduce before, but I want to revisit the topic here.  Not MapReduce itself, but instead the white paper.

I noticed the ease of reading the white paper. Kudos to the authors: Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. Their writing was easy to comprehend. It wasn’t simplistic, but neither was it steeped in scientific technobable.

While MapReduce gets lots of talk because it was developed by Google and because of Google’s extensive use of it, it has also disseminated widely, in my opinion, because it has had such an accessible white paper written on it.

This produces good will towards Google and peace on earth. Well, one out of two isn’t bad. Why should Google care if the rest of the world knows about MapReduce? It helps Google to extend it’s brand. And ultimately, it’s about how you use it, not that you know about it. By letting it out, Google gets to see what innovations others can devise that Google can then make use of.

That’s just smart business.