The world of business has evolved over the years especially due to advancements in technology that have changed how businesses operate. Normally, under stiff competition, businesses tend to hide their ideas as much as they can to make sure that their competitors have no idea about what their next move could be. To them, this is the best way for them to surprise their competitors.
Similarly, the software development world operated in the same way. Businesses and developers would hide their ideas and code and only release products when they were completely done. They would even market their applications when they were sure that they have completely built them and would not share their code with the outside world.
However, with the evolution of technology and the influence brought about by APIs, this has completely changed. APIs pushed developers and businesses to adopt the open-source model that encourages them to embrace community based and transparent development.
Here, they share their code with the outside world free of charge and get back project use cases and feedback about their applications. They use APIs, mostly public APIs to add functionalities to their applications and to make sure that they meet their requirements. Using these APIs requires the deployment of useful clients that tests them for performance, reliability, security, and functionality correctness.
Open source, aided by APIs, is reshaping software development and collaboration in a number of ways, among them;
Encouraging Creativity and Innovation
Apart from the fact that APIs provide developers with ways through which they can add functionality to their applications without having to write the code themselves from scratch, they have also created avenues through which the developers can share information, code, and ideas.
This has encouraged developers to focus on creativity and innovation instead of business. Their main aim is to write code together and come up with applications that solve problems to make an impact in the world through collaboration.
Getting the Value of Projects
Initially, developers and businesses worked behind closed doors and only released their applications when they were completely built. This made it difficult for them to understand the real value of the applications since from inception to deployment, they were the only ones with access to them (applications).
However, with API powered open-source, developers are able to understand the value of the applications that they come up with. This has been made possible by people adopting the open-source applications for their use, meaning that they solve a problem for them, hence making it easy to know their value.
Pushing Inclusion and Diversity
Working behind closed doors limited innovation and forced developers and businesses to a corner where they did not have differences in perspectives and opinions. This made sure that they settled into comfort zones and slowed the rate at which they implemented their ideas.
However, open-source has made sure that developers from different genres can go through projects, while working together, bring in new ideas, different perspectives, and opinions and implement those that they agree will improve the final application. This has helped them to come up with more robust and diverse applications.
Conclusion
Finally, APIs have pushed companies and developers to embrace open-source and to come up with some of the best open-source applications that we use for free today. When developers work together, they are able to come up with more efficient applications that meet the demands of their customers.
They are also able to evaluate the applications themselves as customers from different backgrounds to make sure that their applications are solving a certain problem. This has completely reshaped development and collaboration.