June 5, 2000:

This is old, but O'Reilly has a good rant about Web APIs: Meerkat: An Open Service API. Here's a quote from Brian Behlendorf (think Apache):

I think it's fine to have a world where open and closed source software speak--by far the most important thing is that the protocols and APIs be stable and open and free from encumberance, that the software source code is open is secondary.