Google today released a ‘patent pledge’ which promises that Google won’t sue developers that uses their patents.

The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge  will initially see 10 MapReduce patents receive protection. MapReduce is a computing model for processing large data sets developed at Google, whose open-source versions  are now widely used.

At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally. And while open platforms have faced growing patent attacks, requiring companies to defensively acquire ever more patents, we remain committed to an open Internet—one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.

Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

The Next Web made an observation that what Google did is not different than what Twitter did last year, though Google doesn’t go quite as far. Twitter effectively handed over the patented technologies for anyone to use, while Google retains control and simply promises not to sue.