Quoting Sean Goedecke on Good Api Design
The principle here is something like Linus Torvalds’ famous slogan WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE. As a maintainer of an API, you have something like a sacred duty to avoid harming your downstream consumers. The norm is so strong because so much software depends on so many APIs (which in turn depend on upstream APIs, and so on). One careless API maintainer far enough upstream can break hundreds or thousands of pieces of software downstream.o
— Sean Goedecke