- Expanding the API Commons Beyond Just Licensing

With the recent renewed investment in APIs.io, APIs.json, as well as here at API Commons we are looking to expand the API Commons to apply beyond just licensing and support as many open source building blocks as we can. The API Commons emerged in 2014 during the Oracle vs Google Copyright fight, and with this court battle settled in 2021, we wanted to revisit the purpose of the API Commons here in 2024, and a decade later we feel like it is important that we support a suite of open-source building blocks—not just interface licensing.

In the beginning, API Commons was just for licensing your API, essentially putting your API into the API Commons with this decision. In 2024, we need an API Commons of every building block of our API operations. With this in mind we are expanding the API Commons to support the following areas:

Common Schema - Producing open source schema for all of the common API buildings indexed using APIs.json.
Community Schema - Acknowledging the existing hard work of the community in producing open source schema.
Vendor Overlays - Building on top of the APIs.json overlay properties to augment API operations in new ways.
Base APIs - Establishing a base of the most common APIs that we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel with.
Blueprints - Producing APIs.json blueprints from leading API producers to help establish common patterns.

We are actively working to stand up repos, JSON Schema, and examples for all of the common schema, while linking to all the amazing resources that already exist for community schema. We are also just getting started defining how APIs.json can be used as overlays. We will be adding base APIs and blueprints as we continue to profile the API landscape for APIs.io, which we are using to power which common schema, as well as overlays, base APIs, and blueprints—keeping the commons in alignment with the API space.

Like APIs.io and APIs.json, the API Commons is a side hustle of Steve Willmott and Kin Lane, so there will always be some things in here that are unfinished. But since everything runs on GitHub, it is something that the community can contribute to as well. As we find the time, we’ll do more work in here, but don’t hesitate to ask questions and let us know if you see anything missing, mistakes, or any ideas for what else could be added.