Eucalyptus Cloud software threatened by Amazon patent?

Question

Eucalyptus is an open source software to create your own private cloud. It uses the same API as Amazon EC2 (and S3 for storage).

I heared rumors that Amazon holds patents on the EC2 Webservice API and is therefore able to shutdown Ecualyptus (and other systems using the same API as Rightscale) basically from one day to another. However, I was not able to find anything about the patent threat for Eucalyptus on the web.

• Is this only FUD or has this rumor a solid foundation?
• How should I dead with such rumors in discussions?

Answer 1

You can't patent an API. You can patent an implementation, but Eucalyptus is not a copy of AWS... it does things quite differently. There's no reason to assume that Eucalyptus automatically violates any patents held by Amazon.