On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:02 AM, Marcos Caceres <[email protected]> wrote:

> We don't want people going around taking other people's content without
> permission on scale. That's just wrong


Key point there being "scale". Doing it w/o permission "before-scale" is
how a lot of things get started, and that's just fine, I suspect.

To unpack: this kind of non-technical relationship basis for an API to work
is what makes it harder for new entrants in any market.  It's making it
hard for FxOS to gain marketshare in part because it makes it hard for
"flipboard clones" to emerge, because they're by definition not popular
enough for publishers to bother entering in a relationship with, let alone
adding their site to a whitelist.

People who are advanced in their thinking of their server endpoints as a
platform end up building authentication APIs, which I have no problem
with.  For the others (most "content" out there), we end up with an
incentive which reinforces incumbents.  Which is a problem, IMO.

When looking at that security model, a startup hoping to bootstrap
something like a flipboard clone (or ideally something like flipboard but
with some innovation), without the option of SystemXHR, will create a
server which proxies those requests, circumventing the CORS security model
until they get to the scale at which publishers a) might notice the server
impact, and b) will take their calls.  And that, I suspect is fine for 99%
of startups out there.  But it does mean that bootstrapping requires a
server aspect to the app, which then diminishes the strength of a
pure-client model (and has obvious privacy implications).

--da
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