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Yet another example of what happens when you depend upon proprietary software. The developers that are upset should have known better.

pradn 13y ago
It's a little ridiculous to assert that no one should rely on proprietary software. Are all the folks writing Windows applications or PlayStation games idiots? A cautious approach toward relying on an API that's not central to another company's business is the key.
- jka 13y ago
  As a counter-point, the Facebook APIs are pretty crucial to Facebook's business (third party developers and application functionality for users), but they've seen plenty of instability and breaking changes in the past, many of which cause real problems for businesses. If you're aiming for the user-facing side of your business to be self-reliant, under your own governance, and at the mercy of your market rather than of your partners, then it can and does make sense to look at self-hosting open source services and components; you pay a premium for the hosting, but you know that you opt-in to upstream changes on your own timescale, and you can fix issues yourself. In reality it is indeed tricky to be so disciplined, and if some suppliers provide very high-uptime services with reasonable failure modes (e.g. Google Analytics), then it seems fair to go that route - but on the flip-side, data really is money nowadays, and user privacy may be important if you care about such things, so even these decisions can be questionable.
vyrotek 13y ago
How is depending on proprietary software any different than consuming an API such as Stripe which could disappear tomorrow too?
- eriksank 13y ago
  If you move from Stripe to another payment gateway, you will not lose all your users. Microsoft has monopoly access control to the other users, who are needed to make your skype extension useful to the user using your extension. That is why Microsoft control over such user directory is unacceptable.

pradn 13y ago

It's a little ridiculous to assert that no one should rely on proprietary software. Are all the folks writing Windows applications or PlayStation games idiots? A cautious approach toward relying on an API that's not central to another company's business is the key.

jka 13y ago
As a counter-point, the Facebook APIs are pretty crucial to Facebook's business (third party developers and application functionality for users), but they've seen plenty of instability and breaking changes in the past, many of which cause real problems for businesses. If you're aiming for the user-facing side of your business to be self-reliant, under your own governance, and at the mercy of your market rather than of your partners, then it can and does make sense to look at self-hosting open source services and components; you pay a premium for the hosting, but you know that you opt-in to upstream changes on your own timescale, and you can fix issues yourself. In reality it is indeed tricky to be so disciplined, and if some suppliers provide very high-uptime services with reasonable failure modes (e.g. Google Analytics), then it seems fair to go that route - but on the flip-side, data really is money nowadays, and user privacy may be important if you care about such things, so even these decisions can be questionable.

vyrotek 13y ago

How is depending on proprietary software any different than consuming an API such as Stripe which could disappear tomorrow too?

eriksank 13y ago
If you move from Stripe to another payment gateway, you will not lose all your users. Microsoft has monopoly access control to the other users, who are needed to make your skype extension useful to the user using your extension. That is why Microsoft control over such user directory is unacceptable.