[Developers] MQL license?

[Roland Bouman]

Hi Tom, all,

> 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.

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Tom Morris<tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's not really the kind of question where you want to be depending
> on the answer from a mailing list.

heh, I had the perhaps naive idea that some other dev on the mailing
list had been having these questions in the past, and I was hoping to
learn from their experience, for example, by being pointed to a
webpage explaining the terms of use of MQL ;)
I tried the FAQ, and the http://www.freebase.com/ website but coulnd't
find any information that shed any light on the matter. That seemed an
apporpriate moment to try a mailing list.
I apologize if you think I am not using the dev mailing list appropriately.

> You probably want to ask your lawyer(s).

Assuming I would have them, they would be asking be where to find the
license agreement text ;)

> 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.

Thanks! Well, IANAL, but it seems to me at least this patent does not
cover MQL - but perhaps I didn't understand it too good. I'd
appreciate it if anybody could point in plain english what the terms
of use of MQL are.

> 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.

Perhaps. But I am interested in direct applicability in Web (AJAX)
applications. The underlying JSON format of MQL for both query
language and query result looks like a much, much better fit than
SPARQL. In addition, MQL looks a lot more flexible and expressive. I
know it wasn't designed for it, but reading the query spec I can at
least imagine how many MQL queries could be mapped to queries on a
relational database - in most cases no or little extra metadata would
be needed at the DB side to do the mapping. SPARQL on the other hand
seems quite locked into this RDF way of representing data.

(Surely, it isn't that crazy to want to use MQL to query an old-skool
RDBMS? If you feel this is misguided, please feel free to point out to
me what I'm not understanding. I appreciate learning from you.)

At any rate, if anybody could still point me to the TOS of MQL, I'd be
much obliged.

TIA

Roland.



>
> Tom
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-- 
Roland Bouman
http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/

Author of "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data
Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL",
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470484322.html