Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively. It was developed by the American software company Metaweb and ran publicly beginning in March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced 16 July 2010. Google's Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase. Freebase data was available for commercial and non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and an open API, RDF endpoint, and a database dump was provided for programmers. On 16 December 2014, Knowledge Graph announced that it would shut down Freebase over the succeeding six months and help with the move of the data from Freebase to Wikidata. On 16 December 2015, Google officially announced the Knowledge Graph API, which is meant to be a replacement to the Freebase API. Freebase.com was officially shut down on 2 May 2016. On 8 of September 2018 Google has published at github.com sources of graphd server, which is a Freebase backend.