> It's not a problem when you can pretend the components are actually one single component, which is obviously not possible with service architectures or propri

> It's not a problem when you can pretend the components are actually one single component, which is obviously not possible with service architectures or proprietary code. Yes. It seems Stallman is mostly trying to highlight a problem with closed-source software, and he's right, but this doesn't acknowledge that it's not always possible to treat a software system as one big component, even if everything is open source. If the APIs are no more complex than necessary, and do a good job of encapsulation, then it should be easy enough to identify the misbehaving component and submit a meaningful bug report without seeing the source. I believe that with distributed systems and service architectures, there are higher level design principles that we should be adopting. Many design patterns from other disciplines, for example OO APIs, can be applied to distributed components in large systems. These principles encourage encapsulation, which usually results in elegant communication protocols between distributed components.