Google Data

We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions. Here is a link to the exact license text.

Now the official way to announce such a license for specifications under the IETF is to register them in the IETF IPR Disclosure Database. You can read the disclosures yourself in the IETF Disclosure Database.

Google's extensions are also covered by this patent license, and you can find a link to them on the bottom of the authentication schemes AuthSub and ClientLogin on our core Google Data extensions and Common Elements, and on the following Data APIs:

• Google Apps Email Migration API and Provisioning API
  
• Base Data API
• Blogger Data API
• Calendar Data API
• Code Search Data API
• Contacts Data API
  
• Documents List Data API
• Notebook Data API
• Picasa Web Albums Data API
• Spreadsheets Data API
• YouTube Data API

We hope this will encourage sites who want to expose APIs for things like photos, videos, calendar, or contacts to reuse our schemas where they can, rather than reinventing the wheel.