[taffer]

But do you really need the open()/close() semantics for everything? What if we wanted to support a hypothetical filesystem with stateless semantics (e.g. a distributed filesystem), then we wouldn't even need close().

[mbreese]

You would probably still want a close() to release local resources. A stateless object itself might just NOP the close(), but the local handler might still need to release a reference or two.

I think open/close() are probably the minimal interface.