[Developers] MQL license?

[Tom Morris]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Roland Bouman<roland.bouman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Currently, I'm wondering about the legal status regarding the usage of
> MQL in applications.
> In particular, I'd like to know whether I can create applications that
> use the MQL query language and/or implement MQL on top of some
> datastore (not freebase).
> I haven't been able to figure out whether such applications would
> violate some patent or would be considered illegal use of intellectual
> property.

That's not really the kind of question where you want to be depending
on the answer from a mailing list.  You probably want to ask your
lawyer(s).

Back in March, Danny Hillis was granted a patent (#7,502,770) on the
entire concept of Freebase, so it's reasonable to assume that there
are other patents lurking.

If you're going to use a different query engine though, why wouldn't
you use whatever query language it supports?  It seems like extra work
to reimplement MQL.  And of course if you're into the whole standards
thing and wanted some measure of application portability, you probably
want to at least consider SPARQL.

Tom