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."pa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/19/1815257/USPTO-Grants-Google-a-Patent-On-MapReduce?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=10/01/19/1815257"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/19/1815257/USPTO-Grants-Google-a-Patent-On-MapReduce?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/j3-UTSP2KBdRIFKZwV64Vrp6wD8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/j3-UTSP2KBdRIFKZwV64Vrp6wD8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/j3-UTSP2KBdRIFKZwV64Vrp6wD8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/j3-UTSP2KBdRIFKZwV64Vrp6wD8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/LyzcTpXkTos" height="1" width="1"/

More...