Fair Market API Certification Letter

Mailed to US state governors and state budget officers on 2/1/2013 by Joseph Paul Cohen

I am writing on behalf of myself to ask for your support. Your willingness to adopt and promote this certification is the only reason I will create it. I am interested in promoting innovation and free markets. I am upset with the anti-competitive measures that businesses are taking to secure their position in markets. I feel the solution is giving decision makers the tools to make educated decisions.

Proposal: I propose the Fair Market API Certification registry that lists Products/Companies that do and do not engage in particular anti-competitive measures. API's or Advanced Programming Interfaces are used by engineers to interoperate with software and hardware. This certification would promote fair business practices for software and hardware development. Products/Companies will be approved if they conform to these principles:

1. If a customer can build software on an API platform then the platform must be a public versioned standard so that another vendor can implement that platform and sell it to the customer.
2. A vendor may release and support a Free and Open Source platform without standardizing it as long as it is possible to make derivatives of this platform.

This is a proposal to help consumers avoid a vendor-lock-in situation that limits their ability to change software/hardware vendors. Supporters are expected to be software startups, governments, and consumers.

Open standards such as HTML, HTTP, E-Mail, USB, DNS, PDF, JPEG, and TCP/IP have been a success for enabling vendors to innovate and compete without replacing an entire company's infrastructure. Exclusive use of public standards throughout a company/household is the best way to cultivate innovation and competition as well as security.

Governments currently use independent certifications to guide their purchasing. For example the EPEAT url{http://www.epeat.net/purchasers-and-rfps/} certification is used by the state of California to reduce the cost of evaluating equipment for harmful impacts to the environment.

Outcomes: This certification will give our nation greater national security by allowing the replacement of undesirable platforms that are currently required to run the mission critical applications for our nation.

This will be a valuable asset to decision makers who don't have access to knowledgeable staff to deeply evaluate the software they are investing in.

Maintaining a fair market in the software market is critical in allowing innovators to compete with established markets. This provides hard working skilled Americans with the ability to create their own jobs.

This will foster a market where the truly best product wins and not those that are the best at keeping competition out.