To avoid a clash with the protected non-static method with the same name in Hadoop 2:

https://github.com/apache/hadoop-common/blob/trunk/hadoop-mapreduce-project/hadoop-mapreduce-client/hadoop-mapreduce-client-core/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/mapreduce/lib/input/FileInputFormat.java#L303

Thanks for taking a look, @julienledem