[Developers] MQL license?

[John Giannandrea]

Roland Bouman wrote:
> 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.

Roland,

The short answer is that we would be happy for anyone to make their  
own MQL implementation.  The language specification is freely  
available and we have written papers and given talks about how it  
works.  In addition most of the MQL language machinery is inspectable  
in MQL itself.  We are aware of one other effort to implement a MQL  
clone (although that project is not open source)

The long answer is that there is a distinction between Freebase and  
Metaweb.

Freebase is free, that is the contents of the database is covered by a  
CC-BY license.  We provide the data directly in data dumps and via the  
API for anyone to use for any purpose with the sole requirement that  
you must provide attribution as specified in the terms of service.   
Freebase is a community owned project.

The service that hosts Freebase, however, is not open source.    
Metaweb, a commercially funded company, developed the platform that  
hosts Freebase and reserves the right to make revenue from that  
platform.

We *have* open sourced a significant number of tools, libraries and  
projects and expect to continue to do so.   The core database and our  
specific implementation of the Metaweb API remains proprietary since  
it is the basis for how we expect to fund our ability to keep hosting  
the Freebase project.

Metaweb owns the trademarks 'MQL'  and 'Metaweb Query Language' and we  
reserve the right to this name.   At some point if there are several  
MQL implementations we might need to come up with some kind of  
'conformance' test before we could license the name and be confident  
that other implementations were interoperable with the original MQL  
API.   Ideally MQL will be so successful that it will end up  
standardized by some open standards body.

We are keen to see the MQL language get wide adoption.   If this  
happens via an implementation that is not our own, we would be very  
supportive.  Metaweb has applied for several patents relating to our  
specific implementation of MQL and our underlying graph store.   None  
of these patent applications relating to our platform have been  
granted.  To the extent that Metaweb is ultimately granted any patent  
claims on aspects of our own MQL implementation, Metaweb would be  
willing to grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free,  
irrevocable license for any specific patents necessarily infringed by  
an implementation of the MQL specification.  Indeed we could not  
expect widespread adoption or standardization without doing so.

I hope that makes the situation clear and we would be delighted to  
help you as you use MQL in your applications.

-jg

Metaweb CTO