Hi David. Many thanks for taking the time to explain your thinking so clearly. I apologies if my original post come across a bit demanding. I imagined you were going to be changing the underlying architecture of the API, and all code developed to date would become useless. I’m glad to see that this is not the case!
I appreciated your need to control the ability of third party apps to access ALL data from ALL public stations. You have certainly made it clear that users will always be able to access their own data, but you have also indicated to the community that WeatherFlow as a company intends to leverage the huge amount of data that this weather network will be providing to produce commercial outputs such as hyper-local forecasts (see: Forecast API/Software?). I assume you’ll be using some of these commercial outputs to offset the likely huge development costs you have sunk into development of the weather station, so it seems reasonable to me.
However, I would caution that the community is always going to feel like it ‘owns’ more than just their data. After all, it is the community that is buying the product and going to the effort of installation etc. Just look at the backlash against Weather Underground for removing their free API (I know you have no intention of doing this!!!). Therefore I think there needs to be a halfway-house whereby access to ALL data for a third party developer can be given on a case-by-case basis (as you have already indicated might be the case). For example in this system I would envisage that the maps simply showing the conditions at each station being developed by @GaryFunk and @Weather34 will be given the go ahead, as they are not generating any derived output. In contrast, an app that wants to derive a forecast, which clashes with your commercial apps/output, may not.
Hope this makes sense, and many thanks again for taking the time to explain.
PS. Please don’t make any changes soon!! I am still waiting for my station (I was a very late backer), so am having to relay on data from another station during development.