Dang! Haven just written about the wonders of both open source and free services, I came face to face with a downside. What’s given freely in an API can just as easily disappear. I’m about 1/8th of the way through two online courses from DataCamp on using python to analyze financial data, only to find out that Google and Yahoo have both dropped (as of late last fall) their historical price data API (Application Programming Interface) that everything depends on. The key tools, an open source program called pandas, has been updated with work-arounds, but the course material hasn’t been updated, leaving me dead in the water. The data was provided free by both Yahoo and Google for decades, so while they have no obligation to keep providing the data, it has a pretty wide-spread impact when they stop. Lots of dependent applications broken!