APIs are not just about technology. As in many business problems, what we really have is a people problem. APIs offer a common pattern to help people to collaborate.

Why did open source succeed? Although the availability of source code is often the focus of discussions about the success of open source, the idea of self-service is much more important. Only a tiny percentage of developers wanted to read or modify source code. Instead, open source software displaced commercial software because developers did not have to ask anyone for permission to take the software and run with it. Publishers of APIs learned from open source. A successful API must be available on a self-service basis and be easy to use. Like open source projects, the best APIs have thriving online communities, either internal to the company or in ....