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Is the Flickr API a National Treasure?
First time accepted submitter somekind writes "Over the past few months Twitter imposed restrictions on the use of its client API, and Facebook shut down the facial recognition API supporting face.com after acquiring the company. Mathew Ingram noted these and other examples (Google starting to charge for high-volume use of Google Maps) as evidence that 'open APIs' published by a single vendor can't be trusted by outside developers. Worried about the possibility that Yahoo! might do the same with Flickr, Dave Winer has just launched a petition to Obama asking the President to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark, thus (by Dave's reckoning) legally protected from arbitrary withdrawal or wholesale changes by its corporate masters."
Wow !! Love it to death !! Wish it would DIE !!
If we learned anything, software dies. Twitter, Facebook, Flicker and whatever flavor of the times websites eventually be forgotten like MySpace, Geocities, AOL and Yahoo
did you forget to take your meds?
Dave Winer has just launched a petition to Obama asking the President to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark, thus (by Dave's reckoning) legally protected from arbitrary withdrawal or wholesale changes by its corporate masters."
Yeah nice meaningless stunt.
If the API is truly "open" then this guy can buy the servers and the network connectivity and the electricity and the hosting support needed to host the sotfware that keeps it going in perpetuity and he won't have to worry about Flickr suing him becuase it's "open".
Something tells me he is more upset that somebody else won't be paying for all of those things for his personal gain. Well guess what: When you live by the "free" service you die by the "free" service.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I can understand his frustration, but national treasure? That's a little ridicules.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
My mates and I are lobbying to have the neighborhood Pizza Hut declared a national landmark, so we can always eat there for free.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I would personally find it quite hilarious if Yahoo! preemptively shuts it down just to avoid any headaches caused by this nonsense.
'open APIs' published by a single vendor can't be trusted by outside developers
No shit, sherlock!
You mean that companies that offer free (or non-free) stuff can and will stop doing so when their own interest points in another direction?
I think google et al are great for writing software that allows other people to interoperate in an easy way ... but that does not put a burden on them to continue supporting it after it is no longer in their best interest. We could define "open API" to mean that the server side software is implementable by a third party (like IMAP and even SMB are), but probably their APIs are so useful because they plug into a core product that they're not willing to open source and is extremely difficult to replicate (cf. iOS maps).
If your business depends on google doing or not doing something, then you are either taking a big risk (and entrepreneurship is about taking risks, so that's not necessarily a bad idea) or you should have a contract with google that they will do as needed for your business to succeed. If you take a big risk as a company and fail, well that's what bankruptcy protection is for ;-).
Worried about the possibility that Yahoo! might do the same with Flickr, Dave Winer has just launched a petition to Obama asking the President to declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark, thus (by Dave's reckoning) legally protected from arbitrary withdrawal or wholesale changes by its corporate masters."
I'm sure he'll get right on that after he finishes up with the: "Fiscal Cliff", shit in Middle East, Appointment of a new Secretary of State, Budget negotiations next year, ....,.... family issues, ... playing with his dog, shooting some hoops, ...,...,..., the recreational root canal, ..., ... , Flickr API.
that companies would act as charity and keep their business available for free?
The last thing in the world we need is a pack of bureaucrats telling anyone how to develop their products. Maybe Dave Winer thought he was being funny, but if he's serious, he should be slapped upside the head, good and hard.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Aren't standards something the FCC is supposed to protect? Even better though an international organization should champion standards. I would suggest the ISO but after the whole OOXML fiasco they seem to be okay with declaring these same kinds of proprietary standards as standards.
Real standards need to rely on only open pieces throughout, and revisions especially if frequent should be backwards compatible. If you break compatibility, you should be creating a totally new and separate standard.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
On the one hand, yes, anyone who complains about a company that stops providing a free services is a whiner who deserves the scorn people send them.
On the other hand, there are a lot of sites that make use of all the various APIs going around. Some of which may not even be maintained anymore. If google dropped it's maps api tomorrow, a massive number of websites would break, or parts of them would break. It's the internet equivalent of the world economy. There is functionality now that other sites *can't* replicate, because it's not worth doing so on the scale of an individual website. But I have yet to see a single one of these APIs that could be considered essential. The web worked just fine before all these APIs appeared.
People will have to learn that these services are not actually free, and start paying for the privilege of using them, or they should learn to do without.
So, because it's a service that others find useful, the company should be responsible for maintaining it, for free, in perpetuity?
National Treasure 3: Quest for the IP Hoard
Galaphine
The problem is that one individual or one company doesn't have enough bargaining power to keep an API available. Collectively, many individuals and businesses would have bargaining power. Pre-Internet, government was a practical way to collectivize action. These days, it's no longer necessary, with things like the ransom model used to release Blender 3D a decade ago and Kickstarter now.
Or, you could switch to something that tries to be open in the first place, such as openstreetmap.
Sadly, it's hard to make something like that very good without a company willing to put extra money in it.
I'm a bit surprised about Google though : they make money through advertisements. The more people use it, the more money comes in.
Here's an idea : add advertisements related to the places you are looking at in google maps.
I wouldn't mind getting ads of restaurants when I'm looking at the place I want to go on vacation.
Seriously, does he think the government will prop up Yahoo, should things get worse, to protect the Flickr api? This is the problem when you can't build your own websites or choose not to and rely on other people. They aren't charities. They will eventually charge you or remove the service. That is just how it is always going to work so long as you rely on businesses for "free" things.
No, it's not.
Do you have any other asinine questions that I can answer for you?
What an awesome idea! Why don't we use the same method to prevent gas prices going up - just declare all oil companies property of the Federal Government!
We can do this with EVERYTHING! Shit!
Free pot for everyone!
Aren't standards something the FCC is supposed to protect? Even better though an international organization should champion standards
I think the WWE would be better suited to take on those duties than the organizations you've mentioned.
It's unreasonable to lay a burden on a private company that it must or even should continue to support any piece of privately developed and useful software.
The obvious solution is not just open APIs but fully open source software. This ensures that whoever finds the software useful can maintain a workable version as long as they need or want to use it. However, businesses are reluctant to do this because you don't want to give away your ability to do business to competing services. This means that even if you open-source parts of your business's code, you may want that code to pass information along to proprietary software for services that are important to your business but not to the generic-use aspects of it.
For a service like Flickr, there could be an open-source program for uploading, viewing and downloading pictures, but you might use proprietary and commercial software to manage such functions as controlling which other users and accounts can see your pictures, editing them online, managing commercial accounts, etc.
In general, I think industry would benefit greatly if companies would release superceded versions and obsolete and no-longer-marketed software as open source under free-to-use-and-modify-as-you-wish terms. There's no need to lock up old code that you're no longer interested in selling.
Such a move, if even legal, would be considered a taking and the government would have to compensate Yahoo. Highly doubtful and a meaningless, stupid stunt.
..with the recent events he has to get to work on totally banning guns from the general public. Time for the constitution to go bye bye!
There is a solution for Dave's dilemma. He should start a rival service to flickr (i.e. pay for it) and then personally guarantee to keep it and its API running for free forever. Go ahead Dave! What is stopping you?
He's just jealous he didn't come up with the Death Star petition first.
National Treasure 3 (2014). Here's a still photo from the set. :-)
What we need are open protocols that allow anyone to run a personal server of their own (at home or shared hosting or whatever - it's your choice).
Unfortunately it seems the social networking generation is more than happy to let Facebook, Twitter and Flickr control access to their own content.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
So, I've worked a little bit in historic preservation, and know some of the basics regarding the law.
An API wouldn't qualify to be an historic landmark, because the statute specifically requires a landmark to be a building, site, structure, object, or district. In this case, buildings are are functional objects built primarily to shelter human activity, structures are functional objects built for some other reason than a building, objects are either too small to be considered a building (e.g. a fencepost) or not built for function (e.g. a sculpture), sites are locations of historical significance, and districts are groups of multiples buildings, sites, structures, or objects (see http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb15/nrb15.pdf). So, not being a tangible object, an API can't be an historic landmark without a major change to the law (and good luck with that).
Even assuming you had the law changed so intangible objects could be national historic landmarks, it would still probably fail the test to be a national historic landmark. To be an NHL, something must meet one of six criteria: be associated with a person nationally significant to US history (Flickr's API fails); be associated with events that have made a significant contribution to, and are identified with, or that outstandingly represent, the broad national patterns of United States history and from which an understanding and appreciation of those patterns may be gained (Flickr's cool, but hasn't really made a significant contribution to US history); represent some great idea or ideal of the American people (this one is explicitly said by the National Park Service to only apply in rare instances, and the ideas they talk about are things like attaining democracy, achieving freedom, and securing fundamental rights, not being a really cool way to share pictures); distinguish an architectural type specimen exceptionally valuable for a study (they mean physical architecture, not computer architecture, so Flickr fails this one); be composed of objects not individually important enough to be a historic landmark but together having the importance to be one (Flickr's API would be a single object, so it prima facie fails here); or (summarizing here) being archeologically important (Flickr isn't). (http://www.nps.gov/history/nhl/tutorial/hotlinks.htm#natsig)
All that being said, Dave Winer seems to fundamentally misunderstand what being a national historic landmark means. It doesn't mean you're open to the public, it just means you can't (without great difficulty) change it. So, as long as Yahoo didn't change Flickr's API, they could legally shut off public access to it. Which would probably suit Yahoo just fine.
This is fucking ridiculous.
Although it would be funny if this was done. Yahoo! could then wait for the uptake and start charging "maintenance costs" for it.
Either way, if it ever did happen Yahoo or its future owners would end up with tax payer money to safe guard the national treasure. It'd be funded by the tax payers, it would be almost impossible to change it anyway, so would never be enhanced.
Sounds like a lwin-lose situation. Yahoo wins, users and citizens of the United States of America lose.
I find one of the biggest problems of an open source project, is to come up with a good, precise API, and interface. If the Flickr API is THAT good, it is time to start work on an open source version of it, since we know exactly what its APIs and interface should be. If the Flickr API is not that good, as I suspect it is not, then this guy is just wasting our time.
I can understand the motivation. Flickr is yet another massive trove of user content from all over, much of it banal but with quite a few gems as well that could disappear on a corporate whim. It's not really a great state of affairs for human culture. It's only natuiral that people want to see it preserved somehow.
Meanwhile, there is a growing ecosystem that depends on the API. We wouldn't want to swee all of that just suddenly stop working one day either.
All of that said, Declaring the API itself a national treasure seems outlandish and declaring the archive so seems unlikely to actually work. We can't make them maintain the archive and keep paying the bandwidth bill if they decide they want to stop.
So what we REALLY need is a way to build up such collections in a way that they don't live or die at the whim of a single entity.
Now when companies can't compete and can't sue one another to prosperity they demand the government step in and exercise fascism.
Awesome. I hope all the executives of this company die in a fire.
No it isn't, but like many things that have transpired on the WWW, it could have been implemented as an RFC. If it had been, it would be not only a national treasure but an international treasure like the IP protocols, TCP, and any number of other protocols with free specifications that we are free to implement, without the encumberance of patents, copyrights, or trademarks.
If we as a country really feel that much about all this we could purchase a license to the API and have the Library of Congress host the entire FlickR, archive. We'd have to compenstate Yahoo fairly. It's an interesting idea. Sorry though, we spent it all on wars that corporations wanted because selling weapons is profitable. We spent it on drugs that should cost much less, but pharma companies manipulated the FDA so that drugs formerly compounded by pharmacies would now cost 100 times what they once did. Sorry America. Sorry world. We're all tapped out.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If something is younger than your dog, it's not historic.
...is dumb.
Why doesn't w3 or someone have a serious effort going to create standardized web service APIs?