Why did Google release their mapReduce algorithm/cluster setup?
bayareaguy: In this particular case the ideas weren't particularly new - when I first heard about Map-Reduce I thought people were talking about MPI's AllReduce function http://www.mpi-forum.org/docs/mpi-11-html/node82.html from the 1995 MPI spec and even then it was nothing new.  Teradata and others shipped systems operating on the same principles a decade earlier.But to answer your question: all large companies need to publish the central technical ideas in one way or another to ensure their own current and future technical staff understand how their systems work (e.g. IBM Systems Journal).