Kudos to Google (soon) and Facebook (already) for offering open APIs, empowering the development community to create interesting (and hopefully profitable) applications based on those APIs. Opening the APIs allow the developer community to develop interesting applications, and enrich everyone’s user experience. However, there is a basic limitation of the current notion of open API (unless it is an open source project) – the owner of the API gets to decide for the developers what is opened (i.e. what programmatic access is allowed), and what remains unavailable. Sometimes limitations are created on purpose – limiting what developers have access to for business, security or other reasons. It is clear the owner has the right to limit usage to protect their rights – but limiting access will just stifle creativity – especially if the APIs are too limiting. Also, in many cases the limitations are artificial – the owner just hasn’t had time to develop all the possible APIs, or haven’t through all the use cases (if that is even possible) leading to a limitation that stops somebody building some really useful new application.
The only way to get around this is to allow the developers to create APIs themselves, or make it possible for anyone to extend and change the APIs and submit it back to the community - not be reliant on the owners to develop it for them. This would lead to a rich evolving set of APIs maintained by the developer community. Until then – open APIs will never be truly open.
And about the owner’s rights - my guess is that this will need to be done contractually rather than programmatically.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Mashup, Web 2.0, freeware, open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.