The ability to make use of open source tooling, driving the cost down to zero, without giving anything back, because customers cannot prove what technology stack is being used.
Because their employees' time is worthless?
without giving anything back
Isn't this a bit of a red herring? Local forks have a maintenance cost, so there is still an incentive to contribute and improvements back upstream (isn't this why BSD-licence projects do not in fact receive zero contributions from corporate users?). Conversely, posting source tarballs full of unmergeable (whether due to style, quality, or incompatibility) changes doesn't help anyone.
because customers cannot prove what technology stack is being used
This is false. Open/free licenses do not (cannot) restrict use, because they work by allowing things that copyright laws would otherwise forbid (which is why AGPL cannot be considered a True Open/Free License). Whether or not customers can prove or know what stack is being used, is completely irrelevant.
Morals aside, this is not typically the case. You can legally run GPL software as a service without contributing back, for example. The AGPL fixes this loophole but as far as I am aware is seldom used. (IANAL etc.)
Ghostscript is probably the most widely used piece of AGPL software. That one's driven mostly by their dual-licensing strategy (they want proprietary SaaS providers to buy the commercial version of Ghostscript).
Author's analogy (Prop. APIs == Patents) is completely false.
These juridical and technical restrictions and
business dependance [sic] with specific licensing
defined by ToS are a new kind of patent.
Not to mention that a patent is protected by the state (hint: that's why it's called the United States Patent and Trademark Office), whereas Terms of Service are contracts between private parties that are entered into voluntarily.
The basic right of a patent is that of exclusion -- i.e., excluding others from "practicing" your invention (usually defined as producing, offering for sale, or importing).
However, if you don't like some company's API, there are perfectly legal ways to clone the backend service and construct an API that is basically identical.
If there is a monopoly power on behalf of proprietary APIs, it's created by market inertia and NOT by a state-granted artificial legal monopoly.
I'm getting a little sick of non-lawyers getting away with posting stupid analogies with linkbaity titles. If you want to attack the patent system, fine. But please, for the love of God, do 10 minutes of research first.
>If there is a monopoly power on behalf of proprietary APIs, it's created by market inertia and NOT by a state-granted artificial legal monopoly.
Or it's created by the investment necessary to retool everything to work with a "basically identical" API which cannot be substantially identical. I wonder if they'll be a market for people that come up with synonyms so that companies offering an identical service with entirely different codebase can avoid duplicating copyrighted calls. Maybe we can download shims from torrent sites?
Openness for APIs is about to be Accessible, to be Public, to be Neutral and to be Re-usable without restrictions.
So to be Public is one of the part of to be Open, in my opinion of course. Some people have made a larger definition about openness http://opendefinition.org/okd/
Did the Oracle vs Google case prove that APIs aren't the new patent?
A few points worth bearing in mind: 1) There is no monopoly, so ultimately no API provider can abuse their power without limit 2) This is reinforced by the fact that the API interface itself cannot be patented (though some have tired and disputed it in courts), so one provider can be replaced by another 3) Nevertheless some API providers with strong market power (e.g. Twitter) have trampled on the rights of API consumers (even if they were legally within their rights as described in the T&Cs)
Ultimately it is up to us in the API community to recognize good API practices, and to bring down those API providers who abuse their power.
I love API's. I love sharing API's with others. I might have even gone along with the article if it said that API's were the best way to show that you have a technology that isn't patentable and enforce a measure of control over it.
You could write a TOS that says that users of the API can't reverse engineer, compete with for a period of one year, blah, blah, blah.
As such you could rope some companies which would do some "build or buy" research in to using your API and then not being able to not use you after.
I don't really believe that, but I could at minimum not faulted the author for this belief.
This article is just a piece of marketing filled with misinformation and poorly written. Don't take any legal advice from it, and don't take any business advice from it.