4 ms·

> It's a win-win. We get to keep building and Yahoo can say they're the first tech company to have one of its creations declared as an official national treasur

by sausman 14y ago

> It's a win-win. We get to keep building and Yahoo can say they're the first tech company to have one of its creations declared as an official national treasure. Typically win-win situations don't involve threatening force (government) to get one side to comply. If Yahoo wants to deprecate the Flickr API, they are doing so because it is not a win for them. Are developers willing to pay to keep the service running? If not, why should Yahoo be forced to?

davewiner 14y ago
Who said anything about threatening! What an incredible windfall to have your API declared a historic landmark. What kind of marketing opportunity would that present. Please. Even a marketing idiot could figure that one out. :-)
- knowtheory 14y ago
  Uh. Dave, who cares if an API is a historic landmark or not? App developers certainly don't. Most devs view APIs primarily as functional objects (although yes there is an aesthetics to API design). I think it's super weird for a government to mandate to another entity that it must maintain a piece of technology in perpetuity. Besides, OSes aren't static anyway... Abandonware apps that depend on a static API are still going to bit-rot as new OS versions are released and fail to retain 100% backwards compatibility. This just seems like a bad idea. I'm also still not clear on what the heart of the idea is. Is it to preserve the API itself as a work? Or is it to try and preserve the app ecosystem? Or is it to preserve a style of request? I feel like if you really wanted to do this, the way the Internet deals with this is to come up with a common standard folks can adhere to, and then to lobby orgs to adopt that. Setting the Flickr API as a defacto standard (just for them) seems weird.
  - davewiner 14y ago
    Of course that's why we should break everything -- because it seems "weird" to someone whose name is Know Theory. Right. :-)

by sausman 14y ago

davewiner 14y ago

Who said anything about threatening! What an incredible windfall to have your API declared a historic landmark. What kind of marketing opportunity would that present. Please. Even a marketing idiot could figure that one out. :-)

knowtheory 14y ago
Uh. Dave, who cares if an API is a historic landmark or not? App developers certainly don't. Most devs view APIs primarily as functional objects (although yes there is an aesthetics to API design). I think it's super weird for a government to mandate to another entity that it must maintain a piece of technology in perpetuity. Besides, OSes aren't static anyway... Abandonware apps that depend on a static API are still going to bit-rot as new OS versions are released and fail to retain 100% backwards compatibility. This just seems like a bad idea. I'm also still not clear on what the heart of the idea is. Is it to preserve the API itself as a work? Or is it to try and preserve the app ecosystem? Or is it to preserve a style of request? I feel like if you really wanted to do this, the way the Internet deals with this is to come up with a common standard folks can adhere to, and then to lobby orgs to adopt that. Setting the Flickr API as a defacto standard (just for them) seems weird.
- davewiner 14y ago
  Of course that's why we should break everything -- because it seems "weird" to someone whose name is Know Theory. Right. :-)