Google has always been pretty firm in its stance that "open systems win." Now its going so far as to publicly pledge that it will "not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked." The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge, as the company is calling it, is the latest effort to back open-source software which Mountain View contends is one of the driving sources of innovation in cloud-computing and the internet. The first set of patents that are part of the initiative are related to MapReduce, which is used to process large data sets, though the compan
