Open API Specs vs Patent / Intellectual Property schizophrenia
April 12, 2015Why?
We are entering an ERA which introduces a businessmind vs techmind schizofrenia syndrome. Open API specifications (swaggerspec/raml/wsdl/jsonschema/etc) are a vital resource for companies adopting eachothers technology.
This is great, but hold on, wasn’t traditional business about protecting one’s intellectual property?
Who are pushing open specs?
Companies, Privacy soldiers, Security fanatics, API fanatics and Free/Opensource are pushing this open specs forward. Their impact is quite big these days.
So in the future we’ll have a myriad of usable api specs online, because all the companies want to make their API highly adoptable. Oh wait, its already happening!
How does the traditional businessman(ager) deal with this?
Here’s the struggle. There’s something about tech which pushes transparency forward. Transparency is needed to let users understand and accept, adopt and to tweak.
In the last years I see more companies making their API’s highly adoptable by pushing transparent api spec-standards (mentioned above).
The good thing about open api specs, is that you can generate api’s from it..or not?
One could argue that the apidesign itself isnt IP worthy, and that its code, databasecontent and users is of higher importance. But is this really true?
Lots of software, in some way or another, gets written by software itself. Sure there’s some gluecode, but most of the basic components have been written by others already. So if we’re generating the software by combining previously generated software..who’s writing it? I guess businesses have to look in other ways to protect their business.
So publishing the api design (and its spec format) is another step into this direction.
Will we end up taking a membership to a ‘Borg’-apicompany (startrek pun), which scrapes all API-specs out there, to build the ultimate API?
Future
If connectivity is the key, will the word api development become something like `serial cable’ over time?
Who knows api-developers of today, will be called web-plumbers in the future.
They just log in to some enterprise account, where they drag wires from one block to another block.
Bugs are nearly non-existent since the quantum laptop already simulated the software for billions of multiverses.
Anyone can do it.
My (odd) conclusion
Disclaimer: usually my opinion changes over time ;)
Great times ahead! (because I’m a positivist). I’m not sure whether patents will dig its own grave in the future. But I do feel that technological progress seems to move exponentially forward without it. In todays myriad of emerging technologies, todays secret is tomorrows bad practice. Patents are in a way, a waste of money and time in that perspective. This used to be different. Also, today a webproduct is launched, and the next month a kid from russia published his ‘clone’ as an opensource repository. I wouldnt be surprised seeing proprietary software not being able to catch up with the variety of open cloud technology. Especially since (I guess) in the future we don’t design, write or test api’s. We let software do it for us based on specs.
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