[mcherm]

> There's no way to guarantee you won't behave like that

True, but I'm not just speculating here, I really DO want to release an API from a big company and have it taken seriously and trusted by the development community.

Let me try answering my own question. One thing I could do would be to publish a statement guaranteeing access to the API for the next 5 years. Perhaps people would find that reassuring. I suspect that our legal department would have a problem with it -- it would prevent us from making changes if we needed to... perhaps even from fixing a vital security flaw.

Maybe something weaker, like publishing a policy detailing the process for deprecating APIs? The process could say that deprecated APIs will continue to be supported for at least a year. It could also specify an exception for security issues. Would this reassure developers?