- Support your good competitors, not the bad ones.
- I agree on supprting competitors in an early stage market, as long there is enough beers and pizzas for everybody. In a mature market, things are different, take your time and your ressources to support...your team and your customers.
It was "copyright troll" You can consider it at a API oriented "patent troll".
This proves that some API providers want to keep juridical and commercial protection out of their APIs, as it was a patent.
Have you seen all the recent API Terms of service changes because of competiting business model of 3rd party applications?
Openness for APIs is about to be Accessible, to be Public, to be Neutral and to be Re-usable without restrictions.
So to be Public is one of the part of to be Open, in my opinion of course.
Some people have made a larger definition about openness http://opendefinition.org/okd/