Open Source Increasingly Replaced By Open APIs 224
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the playing-with-somebody-else's-toys dept.
from the playing-with-somebody-else's-toys dept.
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."
What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the point of opensourcing Facebook? It's the userbase that matters to web-developers, not the server code.
I see no problem here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Open API? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
On your race to the First Post you completely missed the point. Hell, you even missed the headline!
Puhleez (Score:2, Insightful)
"hindering open source development"?
Yeah, sure. Just like the fact that I, like most people, don't donate 10% of my income to the FSF or some other open-source project hinders it. So what?
If you want to judge others from a particular ideological position (concealing code is unethical), you should state that clearly rather than impugn others indirectly.
They are not the same thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Reduce revenue... (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Don't require ads or developer fees
3. ???
4. Profit?
I would have written more, but I think that sums up my point.
Be Wary (Score:4, Insightful)
Many companies have built their products on top of someone else's APIs, to have those APIs change, vanish, or develop charges later on. Do be aware of the pitfalls before you make yourself totally dependent on someone who does not have your best interests at heart.
Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Guess not (Score:3, Insightful)
How should that work?
Two totally different things.
Re:I see no problem here. (Score:5, Insightful)
interesting idea but not FB (Score:4, Insightful)
I do think Facebook is a bad example. Their API is open and the SDK is open too... yes, the code is executed remotely... but that is the whole point because it interacts with the user data... that is the beauty behind technologies like XML-RPC or soap... good luck to facebook opening up access to their whole database... they don't care about privacy but even they would not do that
now, it is true that a lot of companies provide an open SDK with a binary part... a good example would be video drivers which are open source yet include a binary part that is not open source. Games are another example.
Even then, I would still consider it progress because before that there was no SDK, the only way to modify existing products was through a hex editor... at least now, software editors provide an api to interact.
The concept is not even new... windows operating system is based on binary DLLs that many times only microsoft has the source code... yet visual studio comes with sourcecode and a very complete toolkit... but even that was not the first time open api was provided to a binary core... I guess that is just the way software is done
Open APIs renamed: APIs (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an API. Tacking "Open" onto doesn't change the fact that it's just an interface to a black box.
As Stallman's been saying for the last few years, having software freedom is about having control over your computing, and that requires that your computing is done on *your* computer:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html [gnu.org]
Walled gardens are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Open API? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I see no problem here. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I see no problem here. (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:1, Insightful)
> Also, not sure what the summary means with the last statement.
Seems to me that it means "I am a card-carrying member of the Church of RMS, and I'm not about to let any real facts get in the way of disparaging those of less pure faith".
As you point out, it seems a bit stupid. Possibly useful for artificially pumping the Firehose to get a submission on the front page, though.
Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:open source is a race to the bottom (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes! So instead of a single vendor holding its customers hostage, you get competition that drives down prices and a platform that is independent of the hardware.
That's a good thing. Well, unless you're a monopolistic corporation/control freak.
Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's a new game... (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming there *was* one universally accepted standard that Facebook embraced and was also implemented by MySpace. No one would still give a rat's ass about MySpace. The APIs in this case are trivial and you can make up your own or copy them as a de-facto standard, but the data and user connectedness that the service embodies is what matters.
There are two good reasons these companies don't go through RFC process for things like this. One, as above, the APIs are trivial and only of value to their data so an RFC process makes no sense. Secondly, if they were married to the RFC process, every little enhancement has the potential of taking months to over a year to ratify. Nothing is stopping a community for creating an RFC to compete with a proprietary API and if you push it through and are successful and create an ecosystem, then Facebook might implement it on top of their proprietary API.
Incidentally, the same phenomenon can be seen in the 'good old days' of the internet. Cisco frequently did (and still does) roll out a proprietary protocol and when the IETF finally ratifies a standard to do the same thing, Cisco implements the standard as well as their proprietary approach (ususally, some times Cisco ignores the standard, probably due to lack of explicit customer request). Also, at the upper layers, there is a large precedent for people not bothering with RFCs at all. As far as I know, there is still no IETF RFC covering bittorent. There we have a very popular, community driven technology that has been in use for years that doesn't bother with IETF RFC process.
Re:No way (Score:2, Insightful)
That depends very much on the quality of the codebase.
No, it doesn't. There is never a good enough reason to completely throw out a large codebase all at once. Especially if it's been around a while.
No, not even if it's "really bad".
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets be honest folks we ALL know what is causing this, hell its the same thing that is causing the drop in GPL code we saw posted here a little while back, and that is this: RMS went too damned far with GPL V3 and this is the backlash. With GPL V1 and V2 there were big enough loopholes that a corporation wouldn't feel directly threatened for using it, but with GPL V3 RMS might as well have sent a Goatse to every corporation on the planet with a note saying "Here is what i think of capitalist pigs!".
Personally i think RMS went too far and the GPL has had it. The MPL, AGPL, BSD, one of the other licenses out there that doesn't fling shit at companies will end up taking over and RMS can go play in a corner somewhere with his "pure' Loongson ARM netbook and I think that's a good and healthy thing. Isn't that what's supposed to happen in FOSS land when something goes the way the majority don't agree in, it forks? That is what we are seeing here as developers don't seem to have the seething hatred for companies that RMS has since they are the ones paying their bills and all. So i personally believe we'll see GPL V3 go the way of the 8 track and after this backlash is over we'll see another permissive license become number one, personally I'd bet on Apache or MPL but there are several that wouldn't give the bird to companies while still giving the people access to the code.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Lets be honest folks we ALL know what is causing this, hell its the same thing that is causing the drop in GPL code we saw posted here a little while back, and that is this: RMS went too damned far with GPL V3 and this is the backlash."
Complete nonsense. Furthermore, the whole idea about open source is to control the destiny of your investment, customer base while at the same time allowing customers to partcipate as engineers, not just as end users in what amounts to a community which has the final say as to what changes are made to the software it uses, and even if the software will continue to be used for a given purpose.
That result is open source. Open API's are not open source. No, if I have an open API it is not going to allow my customers to participate as engineers, it will not allow the community to control the destiny of the softwar either.
Those API's could be removed tomorrow, you can't improve them, the bugs are intractable or ignored by the corporate Big Brother who is monitoring everything you are doing with those API's.
Are you people just plain stupid or have you had your heads in the sand since 1992?
How can someone post something like this and get a Score 5 as insightful?
Go ahead and embrace your open API's.
You probably enjoy TSA sticking their hands down your kids pants, why wouldn't you enjoy having someone monitor every API call your software does.
F'in diots I hope you get the world you deserve.
You don't deserve Stallman's vision or any sort of Freedom!
-Hack