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.

Apple's recent SDK announcement set off an interesting friendly discussion among bloggers about free vs. nearly free software. Jens Alfke says he appreciates all the work open source software developers do, but notes ...a lot of freeware gets abandoned by its developers, because the developers are just doing it for fun and run out of time or energy. ThatοΎ’s sad. And I think a moderate infusion of cash can definitely help alleviate those problems.