OpenAmigaStandard, my take:

First of all, a dose of reality has to be given to the topic. I don't have anything against open standards, but I've been around long enough to know that they can be interpreted differently. It may sound silly, but it was a problem for years (and probably still is to a degree) with things like harddrives and their controllers. IDE is pretty much an open standard, but Fuji, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, etc have all at one time or another more took a broad interpretation of those standards, which resulted in some incompatabilities.

Next, exclusitivity. Both camps (not including AROS for this one, since it is really a labor of love not profit) are going to want some api's exclusive to their system to give their platform some edge or another over the other platform. A good example of this is the console video game industry.

Specifically, SEGA makes a good case study. Due to contracts, some of their games are exclusive to GameCube and other XBox. Still, they do other games across the board. SEGA is big enough to make every game they produce available for every platform available. However, the consoles need some exclusive games to lure customers to their box instead of the other guys. Thus, they create lucrative deals with SEGA to get that exclusive publication of "Skies of Arcadia" or "JetSet Radio Future" on a particular platform.

So, what I am suggesting is that in reality, some level of OpenAmiga API is benefitial to all parties, and some level of closed API is also benefitial. It is in my opinion that any open API idea be designed loosly, so that there is room for both interpretation and exclusitivity. While this method will leave some applications stuck on one platform or another, there will be a baseline of software for all three platforms. Besides, even with open standards, there will be variances in their interpretation anyway. Might as well suck that one down now; even with an open standard, there will be incompatabilities, so everyone might as well just plan on it.