I think you should reread my post regarding "charities". I said that it's easy for people to mistake Google and other companies for charities because they provide so many free to use services.
I never said open source is a magic bullet for anything. My original point was simply that you cannot equate relying on a third-party API to relying on an open source project. There's a risk to both, but they're very different risks.
Even perpetually licensed proprietary software that you download and run yourself has the advantage that you yourself decide when you want to stop using it.
For instance, even if ASP.NET might be discontinued at some point as was VB6, nobody from Microsoft is going to come knocking on your door telling you that you need to shut down your webserver.
However, if you built your platform around Azure and used tons of services and libraries only available there, you'd have a huge problem the day the Microsoft decided to discontinue Azure or quadrupled the price.
Some APIs are easy to replace, and some are not. I brought up the Skype API because it's one that is not easy to replace. I agree that ecosystems are different, so maybe that was a bad comparison. A better example is relying on Google App Engine or Amazon EC2/EBS, or some other API that has no viable alternatives. More complex and differentiated APIs have higher value, but also higher risk since you can't move away from them as easily.
I never said open source is a magic bullet for anything. My original point was simply that you cannot equate relying on a third-party API to relying on an open source project. There's a risk to both, but they're very different risks.
Even perpetually licensed proprietary software that you download and run yourself has the advantage that you yourself decide when you want to stop using it.
For instance, even if ASP.NET might be discontinued at some point as was VB6, nobody from Microsoft is going to come knocking on your door telling you that you need to shut down your webserver.
However, if you built your platform around Azure and used tons of services and libraries only available there, you'd have a huge problem the day the Microsoft decided to discontinue Azure or quadrupled the price.
Some APIs are easy to replace, and some are not. I brought up the Skype API because it's one that is not easy to replace. I agree that ecosystems are different, so maybe that was a bad comparison. A better example is relying on Google App Engine or Amazon EC2/EBS, or some other API that has no viable alternatives. More complex and differentiated APIs have higher value, but also higher risk since you can't move away from them as easily.