Tom Foremski writes a compelling post about the potential threat to innovation as Web 2.0 companies toy with opening and closing APIs. I think he has an excellent point. There is a threat, of course we can still try to push innovation, but without revenue, how can a company seriously do such a thing?
But open standards will be years in the making, and in adoption. In the meantime, it looks like we will be heading into a closed web of the like that we haven’t seen since before the Internet.
[From The Partially Open Web (Ajar) - The Very Real Threat To Web 2.0 - SVW]
The issue we’re really grappling with is summed up in this xkcd cartoon:
The Internet was born from government funding. POP was invented at the University of Illinois. HTTP was born at CERN. I could go on, but that would be almost just replicating Wikipedia.These were huge developments and laid the foundation for what we have now, but they were funded. I think our potential constriction of our innovation is tied directly to the fact that we’re not funding these innovations anymore. We passed the innovation torch to industry long ago. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that was a bad thing. Industry took the foundation and made some pretty amazing things. I think what we need to consider, is how we can transferring some core technologies back to the community.
Yes, we certainly have a lot of important tools that are open source and curated by others, but I also fear that those tools also exist on the generosity of companies. And while I have no solutions, I do think this is an important discussion that we need to have.
If Tom’s thinking is correct, and I think it could be, we should encourage the companies who hold some of the cards here to work to keep the doors open. Keep the APIs running. In the meantime I think we also need to find ways to support those same companies in revenue generation.
If we want innovation to flourish, which we do, we at least have to try.
