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Six years since it first applied for it, Google has finally received a patent for its MapReduce parallel programming model. Unbelievable. Bah, further evidence that the whole patent system is broken, how can they give them a patent for that?? “Map” and “reduce” functions have been around for a long, long time, Google didn’t invent MapReduce, that's just silly.

Hopefully they won't do anything evil with the patent, more likely to be a defensive move than anything else.