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Tell HN: The 226K stars “public-APIs” repo has been ruined by a greedy company

25 pointsby 7moritz7over 2 years ago
Source: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;public-apis&#x2F;public-apis&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3104<p>Despite having as many stars there hasn&#x27;t been any commits since July. That&#x27;s because a company called APILayer, that holds the repo access but doesn&#x27;t respond to any maintainer messages and evidently doesn&#x27;t participate in maintainance, has chased everyone off.<p>Aside from every representative of their company who was messaged by the volunteer maintainers ignoring the messages, they also malisciously alter the list, by replacing themselves as the sponsor all the way at the top (without monetary sponsoring or maintainance help) and move themselves up in the lists. This all happens without any communication. They also didn&#x27;t communicate at all when lowering the repo access for all volunteer maintainers. This happened after the maintainers reverted one of API Layer&#x27;s maliscious commits replacing the sponsor logo.<p>A few quotes from the issue:<p>&gt; I spoke with employees and ex-employees, but could not get help. I also spoke to John Burr (APILayer&#x27;s General Manager) but he hasn&#x27;t responded for many months.<p>&gt; I made several more attempts to communicate with Julian Zehetmayr and Paul Zehetmayr (co-founders and former CEOs of APILayer), but got no response. I believe they are very busy people.<p>&gt; Also, we noticed that this week all of us maintainers had our access levels lowered without any communication, motivation or anything close to that. Now we don&#x27;t even have access to the basic settings in the repository.<p>&gt; They are now pushing their own business APIs above others (breaking the alphabetically-ordered CI rule). This goes against our contributing rule.<p>&gt; They now removed the repo maintainers list, they know what they are doing 831ff03<p>&gt; Apilayer took over the restcountries project, stopped support, took down the website (restcountries.eu, domain still registered to apilayer) and as far as I see never acknowledge any user feedback

1 comment

7moritz7over 2 years ago
This is a maintained fork: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;public-apis-dev&#x2F;public-apis">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;public-apis-dev&#x2F;public-apis</a><p>And this is a maintained alternative with 6K stars: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;public-api-lists&#x2F;public-api-lists">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;public-api-lists&#x2F;public-api-lists</a>