API copyrights is a terrible idea that would promote vendor lock in and block interoperability. It would be a disaster for companies writing to a small niche AP

API copyrights is a terrible idea that would promote vendor lock in and block interoperability. It would be a disaster for companies writing to a small niche API or who lost access to a flaky vendor's approach to their problem. This wouldn't really be so bad as far as programming languages go. AT&T already cross-licensed the C and UNIX ecosystem to the University Of California's open source BSD project and you could inherit their license. Java VMs and compilers could be distributed under GPL (and Android would be a better platform under GPL with less fragmentation). Python, Ruby, Perl, and the like license themselves to the world freely and easily. I can't think of any really major programming languages that would be harshly damaged. C# is largely effectively proprietary because Microsoft rattles the patent sabre at non-Windows implementations. I don't know what the status of Javascript might be, but the standard API is fairly tiny. Of course, no unfree language or API in the future would ever gain traction without a monopoly platform provider of some kind to require it and still it would never spread beyond that platform. Users would be too terrified of vendor lock-in. Things like Wine would need to take development overseas, but the need for them is shrinking along with the use of proprietary platform binaries.