Six Basic Truths of Free APIs

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Six Basic Truths of Free APIs
George Siemens links to this article and comments, "Web 2.0 is killing open source." I wouldn't go that far. That is not to say they do not pose a challenge. You seem to get a lot more functionality coding on top of Google search or Google maps. And yes, a lot of people are coding for, say, the Google API instead of creating open source applications. But as the article notes, if you live this way, you live only with the blessings of the company that created the API - and as we've seen, even with Google, such companies can be very self-serving (whither the Atom API?) and fickle. More...