Thursday January 26, 2006

Undocumented APIs

I wonder what will happen if/when my product, eView Studio, is eventually open-sourced? I know that there is at least one of my more sophisticated customers who regularly decompiles our code, makes use of the classes they find there to call undocumented APIs, then calls us up to demand documentation for these classes when they don't work quite the way they wanted them to. One the one hand, exposing all the APIs will make it easy for these demands to arise; on the other hand, open code *should* make it easy for them to figure out the APIs' behavior themselves. We often leave classes undocumented to prevent customers from "shooting themselves in the foot." I guess Open Source has a certain libertarian bent, in which people are expected to be grown-up enough to take their own precautions. I would be interested to hear from managers of open-sourced products if this has been a problem for them.

The Adolescence of P-1

I wonder how many people still remember The Adolescence of P-1? When I read it back in the 80s (or maybe 70s), it was already a little dated, but it's still a fantastic book. As far as I know, it is the first science fiction story to describe a computer virus, and it may be the first description of a virus anywhere. Essentially, it's the story of a self-aware, IBM-360-based virus that spreads itself over phone lines. It has a symbiotic relationship with its creators, a computer science major and his girlfriend, to whom it grants nice perks, like unlimited credit from the bank computers it infects. It's both a comedy and a tragedy, and way ahead of its time.