31–40 of 197 posts
From [1]: "On April 8, 2011, the US Department of Justice approved the buyout (of ITA by Google). As part of the agreement, Google must license ITA software to other websites for five years." Now that five years are up, Google would want to deny competitors access to that data. Seems like a good startup opportunity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
> Now that five years are up 2018 - 2011 = 7?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad analogy. Here you are building your house relaying on services you cannot provide yourself (Water supply, electricity), You could at least feel a bit betrayed.
There are guarantees associated with water and electrical services, and their sudden disappearance is grounds for riots and civil unrest. Cloud services are not conceived or configured for durability beyond financial stability, which makes them inherently unstable. A poor foundation for anything you want to last or not be bothered with.
Sadly, people riot and fight over much less than the loss of an API... just wait until black friday or some team wins or loses a game.
"You don't need to take any action. However, if you are actively using this product you may want to find an alternate solution before April 10, 2018." So, you do need to take action? That's a pretty terrible set of FAQs. They should at least provide a list of alternatives.
If a developer doesn't know what "After April 10th, you will not be able to access the API" means, I don't now how they could be more clear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now that five years are up 2018 - 2011 = 7?
7 > 5, so the 5 years are up.
I think they want to shutdown the matrix[1]. They already discontinued the matrix smartphone app a year back. I will be truly lost (quite literally) once matrix is unavailable. I plan out very complex trips and only the matrix can do it. [1] https://matrix.itasoftware.com
We ended up building our own little system that merged our own flight data with data from suppliers. The schema some of the suppliers provided was non sensical and it ended up being a really finely tuned system that would break reguarly if one of the data suppliers decided to change it without notice.
I spent my days dreaming of a standardized data pool, and while some of the data was standardized, not enough of it was.
Thank goodness I'm now working in an industry that we can totally own our data and are not reliant on anyone else for it.
Any alternative API?
I am not aware, at least not of one which is offered for free (one a base level). I have been using this one for Python practice. Sad to see it go.
I was part of a team developing a travel product which needed huge amounts of data from flights to car rental... My god the travel industry is a mess in terms of accessible data. It was the biggest pain point. API's would randomly change structure, endpoints would stop working with unknown errors, data would be significantly different across companies for the same data etc... It was a shambles. Never again will I dev…
My guess is that they are making peanuts selling the API service vs. the handy-dandy rich snippet which allows you to buy tickets (airline, hotel and coming soon packages) right from the SERPs.