Declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/declare-flickr-api-national-historic-landmark-requiring-it-be-maintained-yahoo-open-resource/9gR8kML5

by davewiner • 14 years ago

10 18 14 years ago

petitions.whitehouse.gov

neilk3• 14 years ago

This is a pretty bizarre idea. You really want the government applying laws designed for historic buildings to software?

Even if this made any sense, when you declare something a landmark, you also make it nearly impossible to upgrade. You're saying that most of its value lies in preserving what was, not what will be.

Before you do the "waaaaah Flickr hasn't upgraded in a long time anyway"... http://www.flickr.com/services/developer/changelog/

They are hiring people to work on the API full-time, last I heard.

davewiner8• 14 years ago

You get it. That's exactly the point.

Go ahead and make a new API, no problem, but don't break the apps we built over the last N years while Flickr was hibernating.

neilk3• 14 years ago

Would you be willing to accept the same strictures yourself, to software you have written? You are never allowed to sunset bad ideas or stop supporting them - at least, not until a government committee says so?

chank2• 14 years ago

Even if this were possible, which it isn't. A landmark has to be a physical place/structure. It's a stupid idea.

davewiner8• 14 years ago

Think different.

chank2• 14 years ago

Still a stupid idea.

sausman• 14 years ago

> 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.

Typically win-win situations don't involve threatening force (government) to get one side to comply. If Yahoo wants to deprecate the Flickr API, they are doing so because it is not a win for them.

Are developers willing to pay to keep the service running? If not, why should Yahoo be forced to?

davewiner8• 14 years ago

Who said anything about threatening!

What an incredible windfall to have your API declared a historic landmark. What kind of marketing opportunity would that present. Please. Even a marketing idiot could figure that one out. :-)

knowtheory• 14 years ago

Uh.

Dave, who cares if an API is a historic landmark or not? App developers certainly don't. Most devs view APIs primarily as functional objects (although yes there is an aesthetics to API design).

I think it's super weird for a government to mandate to another entity that it must maintain a piece of technology in perpetuity.

Besides, OSes aren't static anyway... Abandonware apps that depend on a static API are still going to bit-rot as new OS versions are released and fail to retain 100% backwards compatibility.

This just seems like a bad idea. I'm also still not clear on what the heart of the idea is. Is it to preserve the API itself as a work? Or is it to try and preserve the app ecosystem? Or is it to preserve a style of request?

I feel like if you really wanted to do this, the way the Internet deals with this is to come up with a common standard folks can adhere to, and then to lobby orgs to adopt that. Setting the Flickr API as a defacto standard (just for them) seems weird.

davewiner8• 14 years ago

Here's a blog post that explains...

http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/december/aNationalTreasur...

Dave

intellection• 14 years ago

Landmark personal and societal rights to social structures and databases is interesting psychotechnologically, in our real world where data rights, personal rights and property rights are so important.

ozetadev• 14 years ago

This is a bad idea, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark

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