> it is not within Google's right to fsck up the economy that everyone depends on.
I shut down a non-technology brick and mortar store almost a year ago, partly because of dwindling sales due to the economy, and more importantly because I had a single customer that maintained over 60% of my revenue. That customer decided to move the business they were giving me in-house. Negotiations had been ongoing for over 4 years, both to (naively) prevent them from doing so (it wasn't a surprise that they did, they had been talking about it for years), and to suggest that we could merge businesses. Suffice to say, they hired someone else and I was forced to walk away.
I went through a period of "Fuck them", but I had known all along that if they walked away from me, I was screwed. Relying on a single 3rd party API is exactly the same thing. It's a contract with another business entity. If they decide to implement your additions into their core product (take for example today's Podcast app release form Apple), or if don't like your hair color, or they just don't like what you are doing, it's not "fuck them" it's "what's phase 2?". Grow up and move on. This is business. No one is entitled to consume another company's API, or else there would be no such thing as an API key.
> No one is entitled to consume another company's API, or else there would be no such thing as an API key.
That would depend on what you mean by "entitled" and by "consume". Lawsuits happen all the time because one entity believes that another entity backed out of a deal in bad faith.
> it is not within Google's right to fsck up the economy that everyone depends on.
I shut down a non-technology brick and mortar store almost a year ago, partly because of dwindling sales due to the economy, and more importantly because I had a single customer that maintained over 60% of my revenue. That customer decided to move the business they were giving me in-house. Negotiations had been ongoing for over 4 years, both to (naively) prevent them from doing so (it wasn't a surprise that they did, they had been talking about it for years), and to suggest that we could merge businesses. Suffice to say, they hired someone else and I was forced to walk away.
I went through a period of "Fuck them", but I had known all along that if they walked away from me, I was screwed. Relying on a single 3rd party API is exactly the same thing. It's a contract with another business entity. If they decide to implement your additions into their core product (take for example today's Podcast app release form Apple), or if don't like your hair color, or they just don't like what you are doing, it's not "fuck them" it's "what's phase 2?". Grow up and move on. This is business. No one is entitled to consume another company's API, or else there would be no such thing as an API key.