Just came across this thread and maybe we can help out a bit.
As mentioned before, our Precious Parts offering makes use of DigiKey and Farnells APIs natively. We’d be happy to provide open access to our part search free of charge.
Does that sound like a plan? If so we’d have to build an open API for this.
As we do not make our money with advertising we’ve no plans to charge or (like Octopart) lock down the API.