
Declare the Flickr API a National Historic Landmark - davewiner
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/declare-flickr-api-national-historic-landmark-requiring-it-be-maintained-yahoo-open-resource/9gR8kML5
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neilk
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.

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davewiner
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.

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neilk
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?

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davewiner
Yes, of course. And I did it with RSS 2.0, froze the format so we'd all have
something to shoot for.

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#roadmap>

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neilk
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but that does not seem comparable.

* You decided when the spec should be frozen. You're asking Flickr to give away control over their specs.

* Freezing a spec incurs no ongoing cost to you. You're asking Flickr to maintain current services indefinitely.

A comparable situation would be to put Userland under the control of some
external entity, which had the right to impose obligations on you to (for
instance) keep the data available in current formats forever.

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sausman
> 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?

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davewiner
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. :-)

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knowtheory
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.

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davewiner
Of course that's why we should break everything -- because it seems "weird" to
someone whose name is Know Theory. Right. :-)

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intellection
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.

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davewiner
Here's a blog post that explains...

[http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/december/aNationalTreasur...](http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/december/aNationalTreasure)

Dave

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

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davewiner
Think different.

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chank
Still a stupid idea.

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davewiner
Neener neener.

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

