[spacemanaki]

> it's techniques are used by many frameworks in the iphone.

Can you elaborate, or point to some further reading? I don't know that much about MapReduce or the iPhone, and I definitely don't know what kinds of patent Google holds related to MapReduce, but isn't MapReduce a framework for breaking up work to be done in a distributed fashion and then collating results? Is anything like that actually used in the iPhone?

I know what the functions "map" and "reduce" do, but those weren't invented by Google, and MR is only kind of related to them, from what I've read.

[spiralpolitik]

The concepts that MapReduce uses were being discussed at least as early as the 90s. My parallel programming module in 1995 had a section on parallelizing programs using map and reduce functions so there is enough prior art on the concepts to make any patent defense on the general concepts difficult if not impossible.

[spacemanaki]

Also interesting, as I said I don't know much about it or the patents involved. The parent of my comment claimed the iPhone contained something that infringed on MapReduce patents, that was the thing I was questioning.