GData for my own API?

Question

Hi StackOverflow!

Im currently planning to build an API for my service. I want to use GData because it fits the application scheme and there are libraries for many programming languages available. The first question that rose: Am I allowed to do that? I mean, Google put lots of work into the GData specification and have some sort of copyright. Does anyone know anything about this issue or did that before?

You could extend the case if you want to specifically mimic an API which uses GData like the YouTube API to have my API 100% compliant. This is not my case, but I was wondering about that too. :-)

Thank you for any input,

Malax

Edit: Note that i want to use it for my own service. So, I am implementing an API using the GData protocol, not using one of the Google APIs.

Answer 1

I can't find any legalese on the GData site, but I don't think Google has or would enforce any copyright- they want you to use this.

Answer 2

"As an end-user or a developer, you are the owner of your information, and we want to give you the best tools possible to access, manipulate, and obtain that information." - Google

Answer 3

Hey,

Extending the answer of @andrhamm,I think this answers your question

**Our Motivation

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This includes making information accessible in contexts other than a web browser and accessible to services outside of Google. As an end-user or a developer, you are the owner of your information, and we want to give you the best tools possible to access, manipulate, and obtain that information.**

Which is said at Google

Hope this will give you some idea that the api is open source.

Answer 4

As I am considering the same thing, I'm wondering whether you decided to go ahead with it and if so, what issues or challenges you ran into...

Specifically I am wondering whether the libraries provided by Google are generic enough to be used with something other than the Google account system.