Why Open APIs Fall Far Short of Open Source 163
itwbennett writes "451 Group analyst Jay Lyman opined in a LinuxInsider column that because of open APIs, 'non-open source software is often open enough.' Not so, says ITworld blogger Brian Proffitt. Sure, open APIs are an easy way for a small developer to 'plug into a big software ecosystem,' but it's a trap. 'If open APIs are the only connector to a software project, the destiny of that code lies solely in the hands of the owners,' says Proffitt. 'Which means that anyone connecting into the application will have to deal with the changes imposed from the top down.'"
A number of traps actually (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source is superior in large part because not only can the small developer use the open API's but actually shape the development of the next generation through direct access to the developers of the API's used and even code contributions themselves. That cannot compare to open API's on a closed source platform.
I don't understand (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a company that OEMs a product with a published API. They make quarterly updates, but here's the rub...
The updates continually update their back-end in non-backwards compatible ways. We end up running multi-cpu days of regression tests to find what's broke and then spend oodles of man-days tracking down what happened and figuring out workarounds each time we try to update. We're still using the API libraries that are many versions before the latest because of this.
At one point I couldn't figure out how to do something with their API,so I requested example code. They sent part of the source a real product that they market that does what I needed. I soon discovered that they don't use their own published interface, completely bypassing the API classes entierly to get to functionality I can't.
I'd take open source over this pain any day.