[handrews]

My involvement started in the lead-up to OAS 3.1 so I don't have any insight into the Smartbear/OpenAPI Initiative hand-off. Yes, the decision to be vendor-neutral is part of the reason the ecosystem is so fractured. But most technical standards are vendor-neutral and work just fine.

OpenAPI also has the problem of not providing any guidance on what the tooling ecosystem ought to look like, regardless of who implements the tools. You want enough leeway to encourage innovation, but if you don't put out _anything_, you get... well... this. Lots of tools that don't all fully implement things, and not much in the way of interoperable points of hand-off between tools beyond the format. And when many tools leave off some feature or another (most egregiously, external referencing - down the line in this blog post I'll actually show a concrete solution for that), just sharing the format isn't enough.

I'm hoping that this approach I'm sharing through these blog posts will help us start to shape the ecosystem more. For Moonwalk if nothing else (although I'd love to get 3.x into more of an interoperable state- let's make life better for people working with things now, not just years down the line).