The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to
accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today is
announcing the Open API Initiative. Founding members of the Open API
Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit,
Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.
The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to
create an open technical community within which members can easily
contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification
for providing metadata for RESTful APIs. This open specification will
allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the
capabilities of the respective services with a minimal amount of
implementation logic. The Initiative will also promote and facilitate
the adoption and use of an open API standard.
“Swagger is considered one of the most popular frameworks for
building APIs. When an open source project reaches this level of
maturity, it just can’t be managed by one company, organization or
developer,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.
“The Open API Initiative will extend this technology to advance
connected application development through open standards.”
Swagger was created in 2010 and offered under an open source license a
year later. It is a description format used by developers in industries
ranging from consumer electronics to energy, finance, healthcare,
government, media and travel to design and deliver APIs that support a
range of connected applications and services. With downloads of Swagger
and Swagger tooling nearly tripling over the last year, it is considered
the most popular open source framework for defining and creating
RESTful APIs. SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source
project from Reverb Technologies and today is working with its industry
peers to ensure the specification and format can be advanced for years
to come.
The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a
Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will maintain and evolve the
specification, as well as engage users for feedback to inform
development.
For more information about the Open API Initiative, please visit: https://openapis.org/