OStatic

A portion of my job at Splunk is helping drive the development of SDKs for our new REST- based APIs. These APIs are served from the integrated web server in the product, which happens to be closed source. While writing software for REST-based APIs is fairly straightforward, providing various language-specific SDKs speeds up development time and eliminates common tasks like authentication, searching, and error handling for the end users. We've come up with some ways to optimize and open up this process.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Yahoo for $44 billion in cash and stock. Now, Yahoo has announced its intention to become a fully open, platformizable company, letting developers mix and match its services and data in new and different ways. How much of this is designed to make Yahoo more profitable, and how much is simply a reaction to Microsoft's acquisition attempt? Will openness bring Yahoo more revenues, or simply make it a cooler company in developers' eyes?