The Facebook Platform

“The rapidness of web distribution has made older development practices seem quaint and antiquated. But something that’s not antiquated, or shouldn’t be, is providing a service that does what claims, that provides more value than it takes back, and that earnestly cares about the way it gets used”

I don’t often link to other blog posts, but this one is excellent. The Facebook Platform sounds a lot like the Google AdWords API that I used to have the misfortune to write software for. A sociopathic API, constantly changing, that didn’t care about the developers that had to use it. How many of those exist also in the open source world.

I think the best thing libvirt did was to offer a stable API and ABI from day 1. Programs written to a published API should rarely (ideally, never) need to be changed.