TechCrunch posted a surprisingly controversial story on Flickr’s choices regarding an API so open that competitors might make use of an import/export feature to lure customers. The story itself is a bit mundane – the question of open data existed before Web 2.0. In fact, Its probably time someone squash the idea that Web2.0 inspired the open data revolution. Openness has been a rather important theme in machine space for a rather long time.

What is interesting is the flow of comments on the piece, including a little tete a tete a tete amongst the founders of Flickr, Zoomr and TechCrunch. So far, we have an executive at a publicly traded company (Stewart Butterfield) posting to an open forum:

(1) Discussions of as-yet unimplemented corporate policy.
(2) Critical comments of the editor of TechCrunch, labeling a story as “horseshit”
(3) Passing insinuation that this editor of TecCrunch used to beat his wife

As someone who, like Stewart, was part of a company acquired by a public entity, I reckon he might want to consider more closely the necessity of engaging discussions like this in open forums. Its only a matter of time before the Yahoo! PR people, and corporate suite, get ahold of this conversation.