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While this is great and I sincerely congratulate Google for it, I still find the wording slightly disturbing. They say they were going to close down the API bec
by zmmmmm 13y ago
While this is great and I sincerely congratulate Google for it, I still find the wording slightly disturbing. They say they were going to close down the API because only "a few large developers" were using it. Then that since they've heard from developers about a lot of "use cases" they've decided to change their mind.
For me, openness is a relatively unconditional principle. You do it because it is a virtue in and of itself. To hear that we need to spell out specific use cases to justify something being open seems to indicate that Google slightly misses the point. Google shouldn't have to like our reasons for wanting things open. Google should have to justify why they are closed. Indeed, it's in the most unfriendly situations when the openness matters (ie: we want to get our data out of Google and move away from Google services).
So while I'm happy to hear this, and I know I'm picking nits here, it still doesn't quite feel like the "old" Google that really made a principle out of these things.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> While this is great and I sincerely congratulate Google for it, I still find the wording slightly disturbing. They say they were going to close down the API because only "a few large developers" were using it. Incorrect. They said they were going to make it a whitelisted, by-request, partner-only API for that reason, rather than that they were going to close it down. There is a fairly significant difference. > For me, openness is a relatively unconditional principle. You do it because it is a virtue in and of itself. In the real world, few things are unconditional, and while Google has certainly claimed openness as one of its values, Google has never claimed that using open standards is an unconditional principal that is never weighed against other concerns.
- skeletonjelly 13y agoI'm thinking they've learnt from mistakes in their past where they've put in a concerted amount of effort to open source something only then to find out nobody wants to use it. Open sourcing it to their current standard requires code cleanup, documentation etc.
- jessedhillon 13y agoGoogle should have to justify why they are closed. This seems like a rather entitled position to take. By what reasoning is Google, a private, for-profit entity, obligated to make anything of this sort available to you?
- gtirloni 13y agoI congratulate the team involved in this. I don't think this signals any change of course for Google. Perhaps corporate will notice this and tell them to shut it off again, because blablabla google+ blablabla social blablabla. Whatever.