Just wrote this in an e-mail to the MySociety geo-discussion list. Save me having to write it again for here, copy and paste.

Now I read it again, I'm thinking to myself: the open source community have no constitutional requirement to do anything. Legally, their code can't be copyrighted by others, but there's nothing to stop them veering off in this or that direction. So what keeps them going forward? Is the community itself - tightly interwoven as it is? Does this make it more or less likely, in the long term, to serve this nebulous thing, 'the public?'

Someone in the Slashdot comment noted:

Web service standards cannot be driven by the very people who profit most from non-standard solutions. Even when they are designed well, they will STILL carry unacceptable flaws precisely because they are not driven by a collective itch but by a desire to stop someone else's scratch being the one that's used. The day a truly open federation of user-developers (you need a group of people where each person is both user AND developer) who have no ulterior motive beyond solving the service issue is formed will be the day that you see a protocol that requires no "perfect case study", proprietary extensions, overweight IDEs, etc. It will just work and be just used. Same as every other system developed that way has always just worked and just been used.

Anyway, the e-mail:

Google have just quietly announced they're deprecating the SOAP API.

This is an unnerving reminder that Google can do the same with any product they develop. I'm thinking of Google maps, which is a great public service - but not one guaranteed to provide public benefit forever. As the original SOAP developer notes:

"It seems like good discipline to me; when your corporate culture has a "go fast, do a lot of things, fail often" approach to product development, you have to do something with the things that succeeded in launching but then failed to make a big impact on the business."

Maybe Google will continue to do things like Google maps out of a sense of public service - but the whims of Google are the determining factor, not any constitutional or legal requirement to maintain a public service. They also ominously note that they reserve the right to put ads in Google maps in the future; a cynical view might be 'yup - when everyone has woven Google maps into the fabric of their web services and can't do without.' (Like I'm currently doing in a site of mine... doh!)

So? Well, in the medium / long term - and if the promise of some free geo-data following the latest OFT report comes off - shouldn't we be thinking about a google-map-like API that is a legally protected public service? This is a nasty mountain to climb, compared to the nice and fluffy stroll of just using Google maps, but...

A response might be: well, the google maps API is so good precisely because it wasn't produced by the public / social sector or university geeks. Well, now we have the Google maps model to ape - and maybe improve on - it would be nice to prove this line of argument wrong, at least in the UK. Now, if only we could get hold of some data...

Post e-mail: vaguely reminds me of this xkcd cartoon...