Flickr: we'll give full access to competitors - if they reciprocate

By Cory Doctorow at 2:48 pm Sunday, Jun 18

Steward Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr, has promised that the service will allow any of its commercial competitors the API access needed to help customers switch away from Flickr to a competing service; the only gotcha is that these competitors need to offer the same deal to Flickr to help their customers switch, too.

Re API keys for direct competitors: this is something that we've never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn't matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that "fair's fair' and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we'll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

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