[Developers] MQL license?

[Roland Bouman]

Hi Marc, all,

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Marc Slayton<marc at metaweb.com> wrote:
> I can't really speak to your question (sorry), but I am curious as to
> what kind of engine (besides Freebase) you would want to speak MQL.
> It's an interesting idea.

I'm developing RDBMS-based AJAX applications, and for many purposes I
prefer to use JSON to send results to the client. Now I find that I am
always losing some time developing a protocol. This is usually quite
simple but I'm always dealing with these questions like: "shall I use
some REST schema? Perhaps some things are easier dealt with using the
query part of the URI?" For the response I am usually dealing with
plain tabular results, but then I need to ask myself: "Shall I allow
metadata to be returned as part of the response?". And there are some
times when tabular results are less than optimal - sometimes I really
need to get a collection of objects, which may themselves have
collections of objects, etc.

Well, MQL seems to solve all these issues. I read the specification,
and although I realize MQL was not designed for the task, I think that
in many cases if will be possible to map MQL statements (or at least,
a reasonable usable subset) to a RDBMS without the need for too much
book keeping (i mean custom metadata to fit the MQL model) at the
server side.

So a very simple solution would be something like PHP script of
Javaservlet that can interpret MQL, generate and execute the
appropriate SQL statements, and then bunch up the data, wrap in JSON
and return it in the response.
I'm just trying to figure out whether such a script/servlet would
violate a patent or terms of use.

>
> What if MQL were released under a GNU style license?  I suppose
> the product you propose would then need to be opensource as well?

I'm not sure whether its possible to release a language specification
as GPL. I am not a licensing expert.


>
> I'm not really part of the discussion -- just curious in general.

Thanks for asking, and kind regards,

Roland

>
>
>> I just would like to know whether I'm free to create a query engine that
>> speaks MQL.
>
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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