Declaring property belonging to someone else as a national treasure is a highly contentious issue that is often litigated. It is an odd model to follow when I think the author really just wants to convince Yahoo! to tread very carefully with a product feature.
The problem with his post is that it doesn't even attempt to point out what's in it for Yahoo!, the owners of Flickr.
You can hold the position that there doesn't need to be anything in it for Yahoo! to declare this a "national treasure", but then you are fundamentally for redefining the internet and putting in a control body to dictate API versioning just like we have a local control body to dictate what is considered historic.
May be I am taking this analogy too far but that is my point: analogies without explicitly stated boundaries are almost meaningless in communicating your position.
They do specify Yahoo's benefit on the actual petition:
"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."
Let's get the government to force a private company to do something that is potentially extremely expensive and perhaps not even possible because well, because the API might break 'apps'. You're argument is terrible.
I wonder if they'll fix the API so copyright protection is not "on your honor".
As it is now you ask the API for a list of images and it gives them all to you. It's then up to you to check each image and make sure it's legal to download.
It seems to me they should just return the list of ones that are legal or at least have the option to filter the list rather than have to do it manually.
It's worse than that though. You can't use Flickr to share your images with friends and family unless you mark the images as CC. Anything else and an app is not allowed to download them
My app was banned by Flickr even though that's the use case I wrote the app for.
It seems to me they should just return the list of ones that are legal or at least have the option to filter the list rather than have to do it manually.
Flickr's current rule is if it's marked as copyrighted it's not to be downloaded unless it's your image. They know who you are which is how they let you add, delete images through the API.
Otherwise, they arguably need to add more permissions. They know who you've marked as friends and who you've marked as family. Facebook and G+ have no problem restricting access to images based far more complicated criteria.
Their product is a national treasure that you enjoy the benefits of at no cost. Want to show them how much you value it? You could always start a petition to give Yahoo actual treasure in the form of API access fees, similar to Google's Adwords API.
What kind of message would that be sending to future service providers? "Don't give people access to your data for free, because if they like it too much they'll come back with guns and demand it forever."
What if Apple eventually discontinues touch devices and iOS. Should iOS developers have a right to demand iPhones be made a national treasure so that game developers can still use the platform?
Sorry you invested so much into Flickr's API, but you had every chance to decide for yourself whether you should build on their platform.
How does Flickr free vs. Pro relate to API continuity guarantees? Flickr could turn off all API access and you would lose none of the advertised benefits of Flickr Pro that you pay for. If you want guarantees around the API, my initial suggestion of offering to pay Flickr for such an SLA still applies.
Thanks for the reminder. It has been pointed out elsewhere. However Flickr was sold to an American company. But I'm in favor of it being a Canadian and an American treasure. Hell, make it a Lithuanian treasure. Everyone should love Flickr, but please don't break our apps. Thanks again.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea of declaring something a national treasure but the problem of companies screwing around with APIs is a big one, and it is probably better solved by having developers group together in some way to get better bargaining power against companies who do it.
The whole bait-and-switch method that a lot of large companies have employed in the past is unfair, and it usually involves companies enticing developers to pour huge amounts of resources into building on their platform, only to pull the rug out from underneath them and clamp down on API terms or ban applications (see Twitter with API tokens, Facebook with Social Reader etc).
It would probably be better if developers got together and threatened to pull all their apps off an ecosystem unless companies negotiated in good faith, even if only a small subset of developers stood to get screwed over. It's a principle which works quite well for unions aside from when they take it too far. Hopefully it wouldn't skew the balance too far either way, but it would definitely make negotiations bilateral instead of unilateral and result in a much fairer deal for developers.
How about an independent non-profit organization that monitors and assigns grades to various characteristics of a company's API? Developers could consider that as a strong signal when deciding to commit to an API. One of the problems is that it is very difficult to anticipate the kinds of issues an API relationship would cause until it is already too late. This could help with that.
Basically a BBB for APIs but ideally non-profit. The challenge would be in maintaining objectivity and conflict of interests.
In the alternate universe where something like this could happen, wouldn't it just result in companies being more reluctant to publish an API in the first place?
Yeah, nationalization always goes well. I'm curious though, would Yahoo! be expected to host and maintain the API at their cost according to the specifications set forth by a regulatory body, or will they just be mugged and have their property transferred to a trust owned by the government?
> If we didn't do this, the city where I live, New York, would have a freeway running down the middle of it.
And it wouldn't take six days to get from one end of Manhattan to the other. (Edit: That was a joke, if the downvotes are originating from this sentence.)
If we're talking about LOMEX here, I don't think historical markings had anything to do with it being shot down. Residents of a couple neighborhoods in Manhattan were annoyed that half their neighborhood would be demolished to build it, as I understand.
The problem with his post is that it doesn't even attempt to point out what's in it for Yahoo!, the owners of Flickr.
You can hold the position that there doesn't need to be anything in it for Yahoo! to declare this a "national treasure", but then you are fundamentally for redefining the internet and putting in a control body to dictate API versioning just like we have a local control body to dictate what is considered historic.
May be I am taking this analogy too far but that is my point: analogies without explicitly stated boundaries are almost meaningless in communicating your position.