USPTO Grants Google a Patent On MapReduce

theodp writes "Two years ago, David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker deemed MapReduce a major step backwards (here are the original paper and a defense of it) that 'represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago.' A year later, the pair teamed up with other academics and eBay to slam MapReduce again. But the very public complaints didn't stop Google from demanding a patent for MapReduce; nor did it stop the USPTO from granting Google's request (after four rejections). On Tuesday, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,650,331 to Google for inventing Efficient Large-Scale Data Processing."

Meaning for Hadoop?

[harmonica]

Does this endanger the Hadoop [apache.org] project, or projects using Hadoop? Its MapReduce [apache.org] implementation is a rather crucial part.

Re:google is getting evil

[Dr. Spork]

Nah, they got this patent so that an evil company can't swoop in and patent the stuff, and prevent others from implementing it without charging crippling royalties. Right? Right??

Re:will be interesting to see if they use it

[Razalhague]

Considering that another name for reduce is fold, I think you might be onto something there.