Big data has become the latest front for the patent troll epidemic as a shell company is suing firms for using a common open-source storage framework known as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

via Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop — Tech News and Analysis.

Hadoop has been built by a large network of contributors, including individual developers and large companies like Yahoo and is an Apache Software Foundation project. HDFS, its storage component, was based on Google’s Google File System. Parallel Iron’s patent complaints, however, say the whole system was made possible by four men: