If We Publish Our API Documentation Our Competition Will Just Copy What We Do

I wrote yesterday about how people tell me they have partner APIs instead of public APIs, and continuing on this same theme of excuses I hear from API producers, I wanted to explore the reasons why the documentation for APIs is not available. The most common one I hear from folks is that if they publish their API documentation, their competition will just copy what they offer – so they make it available on request. To answer this one I always go back to the example I provided to Google’s lawyers in the Oracle vs.