Jesse Stay posted today on how Twitter's new restrictions, and the complete lack of forewarning to developers, have combined to make his life difficult.  To me this is a sign of a bigger problem in the developer community in that they are far too willing to trust big companies.  Which gives those companies a lot of power over them.

Power does corrupt and companies that get power tend to become corrupt even when the management is well intentioned. 

I know that sounds weird but in my experience most of the abuse doled out in the world is done not out of malice but out of a simple lack of empathy.  For example, people don't think about how they feel when someone yells at them when yelling at the tech support guy on the other end of their phone and in not thinking they cause that tech support guy pain.

But notice a distinction here.  When people are inconsiderate it's only with someone they have some kind of power over.  The same guy who would yell at the tech support person would never think of treating his boss like that.  Because his boss has power over him.   

Like the old saying goes "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity."  Power makes people stupid.

That brings us back to Mr. Stay's issue with Twitter.  For a long time the software industry was ruled over by Microsoft.  Microsoft had all the power in the beginning and because of that they treated people badly.  This led most software developers to latch onto the idea that Microsoft was just an evil company.

But they weren't.  They were just powerful and stupid.

That's my point.  Any company that gets a little power is going to push developers around.  So software developers who believe it was just a case of one company being evil are making a big mistake.  As a result of that they're putting unimaginable amounts of trust into other companies on the assumption those companies "aren't evil."  Whether it's Apple with the app store or autofollow with Twitter these developers have built whole businesses around these powerful companies without any contractual guarantees.  Which in turn has led to those companies burning a lot of developers.

I think it's time for the software industry to realize the rest of the world might have been right when they started using contracts and demand that services like Apple, Twitter, and others provide some kind of guarantee in the future.  Only then will developers really be safe to create things based on someone else's product.