> 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.
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.