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Software Engineering

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  • Is encapsulation, in closed-source environment, also used for commercial purposes? As the source code is hidden, the customer would depend on a third-party API. Next, if a bug occurs, the vendors can easily charge the client for extra services. Commented Feb 17, 2022 at 13:36
  • @chckx592: sure it is, and definitely not just for low-level APIs. That's how ERP vendors like SAP make most of their money. Note there is a difference between "encapsulation" and "information hiding" (closed source). Open source software can provide properly encapsulated APIs, and still let you know about their internals, this is not a contradiction. Commented Feb 17, 2022 at 14:23
  • ... note also that even when source code of an API is provided by a vendor, they still can charge clients for extra services. This can be accomplished by putting a license on their software which makes it effectively impossible to change the software by someone not being the copyright holder (at least as long as the clients and vendors are under the same jurisdiction, and the clients are trusted to adhere to the law). Commented Feb 17, 2022 at 14:30
  • Often, I'm curious about the internals of the code, and suddenly bump into copyright issues. Other times, even though the code is open source, the organs of the program are just way too complex. Encapsulation is like a Russian doll. Components are encapsulated into each other, just as, complexities lead to other complexities. Learning embedded system helps me understand what's going on under the hood, but with an OS layer, abstraction is needed because the internals are way too complex to handle (we cannot think of the hardware with bits/registers/opcodes at this point...). Thanks! Commented Feb 17, 2022 at 14:49