I spent a lot of time trying to convince companies to create OpenAPIs for their APIs. I spent a lot of time discovering, harvesting, and evaluating the OpenAPIs for companies who create them. I also spend a lot of time creating OpenAPIs for companies who do not produce them and I publish them openly on Github. I also know of many startups who take and use the OpenAPIs I create, and also create their own OpenAPIs for companies, and are not interested in publishing them out in the open for others to use. Thinking about this leaves me scratching my head over the backwards API world we live in where the following is the norm.
- API Providers Do Not Create OpenAPI - Just do not see the value or importance of publishing a machine-readable artifact for their APIs.
- API Providers Do Produce an OpenAPI - An OpenAPI is produced to power docs and code gen, but they don’t see the value of publishing.
- API Service Providers Produce OpenAPI - API service providers produce an OpenAPI but do not want to share their work publicly with others.
- API Community Produces OpenAPI - A small group of people in the community produce OpenAPI, which others use, but rarely contribute.
Ask Mike Ralphson who ran APIs.guru, which is no longer maintained. Many people use the OpenAPIs there, but very few ever contribute OpenAPIs. I can speak to the same from over a decade of experience publishing OpenAPIs on GitHub. People love that you do, but almost nobody will give back. I personally know many startups who create OpenAPIs to automate their services and tooling, but refuse to make public as they see it as giving something to their competitors. Could you imagine a world where most API producers maintained and published their own OpenAPIs, and where the remaining OpenAPIs were created and published by API service providers and the community? But no, we live in a backwards OpenAPI world where it isn’t about interoperability, and we keep reinventing the wheel.
