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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."
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.
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?
'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 ;-).
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."
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.
ehh.. the way the government works in this day and age, we will likely see something happening with it before any of that gets addressed in any meaningful ways.
Yeah, this falls right into the "Good luck with that!" pile--even if this were a serious proposal, it's already a dead one.
Flickr holder YHOO and FB are now in a "strategic alliance", and it's very safe to say the less financially successful of the two would rather listen to their more profitable partner than...
So expect nothing (if not less) from this.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
So, because it's a service that others find useful, the company should be responsible for maintaining it, for free, in perpetuity?
>Aren't standards something the FCC is supposed to protect?
Who? Why would they have anything to do with this?
The FCC covers the broadcast of radio waves and allocated spectrum at last look, not APIs.
--
BMO
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.
I do think it's a good idea to make some effort to preserve the pictures, though, for historical reasons.
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.
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?
"real standards" are whatever the biggest vendors do. A standards committee at best documents what the biggest vendors do, and at worst produces a meaningless document. Often standards are in no way open - sucks, but life often does.
You don't think folks on the standards committees share your ideals? Most do, but then there's reality, and nothing in reality is more worthless then a standard that vendors don't choose to follow.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.