Open Source Increasingly Replaced By Open APIs

SharkLaser writes "Open APIs might be the way to get rich in 2012. At the same time, it can also be what ultimately hinders open source development. A wide range of companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter, are building open APIs for other developers to use and build upon. Open APIs can be used by companies to grow their user base and introduce new, interesting features on top of their platform. Independent developers can utilize established services and their users to grow their own business. A perfect example of open APIs is Facebook Apps, which lets individuals and companies develop applications and games on top of the Facebook platform. Developers gain access to Facebook's established user base and Facebook gains new features and fun stuff to do on their site. Instead of open sourcing their platforms, companies like Google and Facebook are providing Open APIs and data access to outside developers. The actual source code for the services sits safely inside the company's network and never needs to be disclosed to outside parties, thus hindering open source development."

Comments

I see no problem here.

[bigstrat2003]

I would far rather have a published API than the source, especially for something like a social networking site where having the source would do me no good whatsoever. And I doubt I'm alone.

Re:I see no problem here.

[betterunixthanunix]

The problem is that web app APIs can change at a moment's notice, without any announcement, and all the developers who depended on the API will be left out in the cold. If Facebook wanted to, they could kill, hinder, or otherwise put any particular third party app at a disadvantage by simply changing the API a little. The running story with web 2.0 is that everyone is at the mercy of the people who run websites; this should not be news (in fact, the problem was discussed years ago).

Re:I see no problem here.

[ortholattice]

Yes, and a Windows developer has absolutely no use for the Windows source code as long as they have access to the APIs. So why would anyone care about Linux?

While you in particular may not necessarily have a use for the source code, the point is that it is unavailable to those who do wish to use it. The "use" might be understanding what it is doing (what information is it sending to the parent company), modifying it (so that it does not do this), and having the ability in principal to continue to run the API (modified to run on your own or an alternate social network) if the site owner goes out of business, does things you don't like with the information you give them, or decides to ban your application.

Re:I see no problem here.

[jedidiah]

> So why would anyone care about Linux?

People care about Unix and Linux is just another Unix.

THAT is what freely re-implementable interfaces get you. Now while it is possible to have proprietary interfaces that can be re-implemented, it is very rare. The whole point of "owning" the API is the fact that you can disallow drop in replacements. You are you're own monopoly and market pressures quickly enforce that.

We haven't moved from Free to Proprietary but from proprietary apps to proprietary services where all of your eggs are in one basket at some Facebook owned data center.

What's missing is mobility of data between different "compatible" services.

Open API?

[dyingtolive]

Isn't "Open API" just a different way of saying, "The first one is always free?"

Re:Open API?

[Tsingi]

Another way of phrasing it (which I remember being used in the context of Microsoft's API): "software sharecropping."

I don't know why this is marked flamebait. I think the comment is rather astute.

What is the point in building code to support a library that puts you in a position wherein you immediately become dependant on something you cannot control. Resulting in a product that largely makes money for someone else.

That's not flamebait, it's wisdom.

They are not the same thing.

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Most of these APIs provide access to data "owned" by the providers of those APIs. They rarely ever provide functionality that is not coupled to their data. These Web APIs are not going to replace open source tools/libraries that provide functionality.

Also, using the term Open API is bullshit. First of all, an API is pretty much always open otherwise it cannot be an "application programming interface". If the API was closed it would not even be an interface to program against but a blackbox.

Re:No way

[MightyYar]

Like I want to build my software around an API that could disappear in 6 months to a year.

You'd be foolish not to, if you could recoup the investment in less than 6 months to a year with a decent return.

Programmers seem to routinely toss away their entire codebase from time to time anyway.

Walled gardens are bad

[Morgaine]

Remember the good old days of the Internet, in which techies used to invent useful protocols, document them as RFCs, and then the best of these would be turned into Internet standards at the IETF? That approach gave us an open Internet with multiple implementations of the same standard services, all competing on merit not through proprietary lock-in.

Well that's not where we are today. Instead we have a ton of proprietary services that occasionally publish public APIs when it suits them, but they're almost always pathologically opposed to interoperating with anyone else that might provide competition. Imagine a world in which everyone used their own homegrown mail prototols instead of SMTP and POP or IMAP. That's where we are today with the social networking services.

Walled gardens are bad. Publishing open APIs doesn't make them any better, as the gardens are still walled and these closed services reject federating with other similar ones. And even if they accepted federation, the complexity of a fully interconnected graph in which each node has a different public API grows explosively, so technically this is a very bad design approach.

Things aren't at all healthy on this front of the Internet, and proprietary services having open APIs doesn't help much. The best that can be said is that it's a bit better than no API at all, but that's not saying much.

Open source was never the way to get rich

[HuguesT]

I'm not sure what the point of the submitter is. Open source and open API have little in common. It's not like one could develop an OS kernel based on some documented open API. Open API is also nothing novel.

Getting rich as an individual is not the point of Open-Source. Getting richer as a software-building community in terms of software availability is.

Re:What's the point?

[Tharsman]

Actually.... the summary does mention that the lack of open source code from Facebook and Google is "hindering open source development."

He may be question the usefulness of Facebook being open source and why would it "hinder" anything.

Still a flawed observation that I replied in another post, but at least it seems he did read enough of the summary (i.e. all of it, not just the title) to jump to his argument.

Re:No way

[Monchanger]

With disastrous consequences: Netscape, KDE4, etc. Throwing away a large codebase is stupid.

That depends very much on the quality of the codebase. They don't age nicely like fine wine, you know.

Re:Open APIs renamed: APIs

[Nerdfest]

"Published APIs" would probably be a better description for what I think they're trying to say.

Re:What's the point?

[Tharsman]

It’s sad that anyone who makes a web service thinks they don’t have to, and as soon as they get 10 more users than they tested their service with the entire thing falls apart and they can’t scale it up to manage users. All they can think of is to try to optimize code here and there, but that has its limits and eventually you will need a system that can handle the scaling demand.

“Scalability” is not about being able to “be as big as facebook”, it’s about being able to handle increased user demands, be it seasonal or popularity based.

Re:No way

[shmlco]

Doing it just because I can "recoup my investment" short term is stupid. Throwing away a large batch of hard won customers is stupid. If I had made a successful ad-supported app with Google Translate, what do I do my customer base disappears because Google closed the APIs? They already had one app from "my" company break. Think they're going to buy another?

Way, way too many companies -- and individuals -- make decisions based on short-term profits, with little to no regard of the long-term impact. That "I'm going to get mine and screw everyone else" sense of entitlement is largely how we got to be in our current mess.