A world of APIs is a good thing. As long as the APIs are public and well documented and, well, standardized. I believe this is an evolutionary step. After you get a solid foundation of interoperable IP and transport protocols, the next logical step is to standardize APIs. What lies behind the API is bound to be propietary, IMO. cheers! ~Carlos On 5/24/14, 1:24 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: > Hi Folks, > > For a while, it's been kind of bugging me that the Internet ecosystem is > increasingly a world of API's tied to proprietary systems - quite > different than the world of interoperable protocols. Sure, every once > in a while something new comes along - like RSS and XMPP, but that's > more at the fringes - and in a lot of cases we see attempts at things by > folks who really don't have a clue (open social comes to mind). (And, of > course, very specific things like, say DMARC.) > > Obviously, a lot of this is driven by commercial factors - there's money > to be made in centralizing systems and monetizing APIs; not so much for > protocols. And it seems like there isn't a lot of R&D funding for such > things. > > Which leads me to wonder - is there much of a protocol r&d community > left - academic or otherwise? IRTF seems awfully narrowly focused - and > mostly at lower layers of the protocol stack. Where's the work on > application protocols (beyond refinements to HTTP, and web service > stuff)? Are there still funders for this kind of work? > > If so, where do folks "congregate?" For programming languages, there's > http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/, conferences like OOPSLA, and there > seems to be a steady stream of academic papers. Is there anything left > like that for protocol R&D? > > Miles Fidelman >