No, Your Service isn't "Open"
buddycloud.com
buddycloud.com
I've never met RMS, and as far as I call tell he might be a bit weird, but I still owe him the greatest degree of respect. Thanks to him, and to people like him, I was able to grow up with software I could hack on my own. I started learning proper programming in the early 90's, and I could do that using free (I'm not going to qualify what type of free we're talking about. If you don't know, you're not on HN) software and the reason is for people like him who lead the way
(ok, this post might be more about protocols rather than software, but the main gist of my point still remains)
"Openness" is a relative and meaninglessly vague term in this context. Anything short of a open-sourced program and completely public data is less "open" than some alternative. The complaints that 99.99% of people make about APIs have less to do with "openness" than poor communication by the provider in the forms of bad documentation and unwarned changes.
TFA: "Facebook Connect is not open. It's controlled by one company."
Yes, because if it was another company, you wouldn't care about this API. The API only matters to anyone because it's Facebook.
I adore free software, but "openness" is a lousy justification for trying to work up umbrage about the difficulties of working in a parasitic developer ecosystem.
I don't know specifically what RMS has said and has not said. For the most of it I'm not interested. What I am interested in are the actions. Like him or not, but RMS has clearly done good things for anyone who believes computers should be devices that you and I are free to hack on on your own.
(I'm carefully avoiding your TFA quote because I have nothing useful to comment on that. Yes, I agree that the API only has value because it's coming from this one company. I don't really think this has much to do with openness).
To the extent that you're fond of free software and RMS, that's nice, but the topic is TFA.
For anyone reading this that don't know what we're on about , read --> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
(edit: I generally agree with RMS's points. I might confuse "open" and "free". For anyone not native to English these words might be interchangeable. I'm not a native English speaker. It becomes clearer when you define the words such as done in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h... , but in a day to day conversation, it's easy to get the exact definitions wrong)
No, we're not discussing one thing vs. another, we're discussing different things. That is a whole other situation entirely.
Are there any concrete steps the different projects are taking to work together?
We're all interested in inter-operability. It's still too early to tell what shape that will take, we're all experimenting in different directions, but from my take on it, the future looks bright for interoperability.
We may find ourselves with 3+ protocols early on, but they'll all be open, documented and available to anyone, and the different projects hopefully will try and support more than one protocol. But eventually, something will rise to the top, it's just too early to tell what that will be at this point.
But that's not hindering anybody's progress, in fact, in a lot of ways, the platform can be a lot more difficult to build than the protocol.
What TOTALLY 100% open service have you ever seen?
I realize that "legit" is a subjective term, so well, that is why TOS for API's are needed.
Actually, you can (and should) build protections against spam and improper use into the protocol instead of relying on a centralized gatekeeper. All truly open systems do this.
However, I have never assumed that "open" means that I have a right to abuse a publicly available API without getting banned for doing so.