Aral Balkan

Remember “Open APIs?” How Tim O’Reilly told us they were how we would build the “open web” in “Web 2.0?”

Turns out an Open API is open in the sense that a gate owned by someone else is open. In that it can just as easily be closed and locked at their whim.

#open #APIs #openAPIs #web2 #openWeb #SiliconValley #openWashing #timOReilly #freedom

Jun 1, 2023 at 7:41amWeb
Show threadDigital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗Jun 1, 2023
@aral Tim just wanted to sell conference passes! It's not his fault (mostly) that assholes put price-tags on API access even tho it weakens the Network Effect.
Show threadAral BalkanJun 1, 2023

@mdhughes Tim’s own Safari Books Online repeatedly implemented “DRM”* to thwart the lovely e-book reader app I was making back in the day.

* In JavaScript no less, so it was a rather funny game of cat and mouse for a while, until it just wasn’t. So I did what anyone would do: released a separate, pared-down app, entered it in O’Reilly’s own app competition, won, flew to the States and had dinner with him on his dime and told him to his face how hypocritical it all was. It was cathartic.

Show threadDigital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗Jun 1, 2023
@aral Until their library CDROM came out, which was not DRM'd, and after, I just always used pirated scans+OCR plus the printed books (more convenient to flip thru). Never occurred to me to try reading anything on "Safari" or another reader.