[Developers] MQL license?

[Roland Bouman]

Hi John, all,

first of all, I'd like to thank you for your clear and elaborate
reply! I am really happy with your answer.

I have made a few comments inline, but they all kind of read as a big THANK YOU!

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 7:36 AM, John Giannandrea<jg at metaweb.com> wrote:
>
> 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).

> 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)

Yay!! This is great news! Thank you so much for clearing that up,
you've just made my day :))

> 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.

I understand and respect that, and I hope you'll succeed in getting a
return on your investments.

> 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.

I don't want to get into any religous open source / closed source
debates either way.
But I do want to let you know that I think you guys are developing
really cool and exciting technology, and I wish you all the best with
it, no matter what license you see fit. I particularly applaud your
policy for releasing some of your products as open source, and I'm
thankful for it.

>
> 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

I understand and respect that. Personally I don't have plans to
conquer the world with any MQL implementation I might come up with,
but I will certainly contact the Metaweb company in case I plan to
release whatever I have in order to prevent the impression that I
would attempt to steal or dilute any of its trademarks.

> 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

Yes, that'd be great! I believe MQL certainly has the potential to
become a de facto standard, and I am  sure that if it does there will
be efforts for standardization. Thanks for your open-minded stance in
this matter, this is exactly what I was hoping for :))

> 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.

Thanks - really, this is great!

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

Yes, you've done a great job of clarifying your position and the status of MQL.
Thanks again, and keep up the good work - you guys are doing great stuff!!

Roland Bouman

>
> -jg
>
> Metaweb CTO
>
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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