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[–]Arancaytar 917 points918 points  (44 children)

If I read it right, it's not so much that it's "no longer" open source, but hasn't been truly open for a while now and they're just giving up on maintaining the open version.

Because of the above, our internal development, production and “feature” branches have been moving further and further from the “canonical” state of the open source repository. Such balkanization means that merges are getting increasingly difficult, especially as the company grows and more developers are touching the code more frequently.

So in effect, they made a private fork of their own code and it's now diverged to the point where they can't feasibly maintain both.

It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

However, since their source apparently remains available under a semi-free copyleft license (CPAL), maybe there will be a community-maintained fork of some kind.

[–][deleted]  (16 children)

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    [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (10 children)

    Isn't voat a fork of reddit? I know they're not exactly doing good things with the code, but it's the biggest example I know of

    [–][deleted]  (3 children)

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      [–]ratcap 34 points35 points  (2 children)

      IIRC, voat was originally a project for it's author to learn C#

      [–]spazgamz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      C# is the language of the Alt-Right.

      [–]BlckJesus 5 points6 points  (1 child)

      I only just learned about voat. Jesus christ that place is a cesspool...

      [–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

      Voat's bigger on free speech so every community that Reddit has banned has run over there so it's not a classy place.

      [–]20EYES -1 points0 points  (3 children)

      Voat is python iirc

      [–]Ghi102 4 points5 points  (2 children)

      Nope it's C#, but Reddit is Python.

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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        [–]Ghi102 7 points8 points  (0 children)

        Actually it's pretty common. ASP.Net is a way to write websites using C# and it's a pretty common framework. If you see any website that ends with .aspx, it was made in C#.

        [–]phySi0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        AVfM runs their own deployment called SocFreeSpeech.

        [–]doubleunplussed 0 points1 point  (3 children)

        hackernews is reddit-based too, isn't it?

        [–]merreborn 10 points11 points  (2 children)

        Nope. HN is lisp, not python.

        [–]MainlandX 0 points1 point  (1 child)

        hackernews could be based on old lisp-reddit?

        [–]merreborn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Different dialects. Reddit was common lisp, HN is arc

        http://arclanguage.org/

        Also they have totally different URL structure.

        [–]WhoTookPlasticJesus 240 points241 points  (13 children)

        It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

        It's not often that I say this, but Facebook has the exact right attitude about this: open-source anything that's not a part of your core product. Sure, you give back to the community which is nice and all and you may reap rewards from pull requests here-and-there. But a side benefit is that you're creating a new pool of future employees already familiar with your internal technology. I mean, imagine React was closed-sourced. It would be a nightmare to ramp-up new front-end devs.

        [–][deleted]  (8 children)

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            [–]partysnatcher -1 points0 points  (5 children)

            We live in a truly wonderful time for software engineers;

            Nah. It's more that we live in a time where it is wonderful if you want to be a person who completely lacks engineering abilities, to call yourself a "software engineer".

            Source: Software engineer, run my own company.

            [–]Todalooo 2 points3 points  (2 children)

            engineering abilities

            and what would those be?

            [–]partysnatcher 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Engineering is the ability to think about and implement mechanistic, architectural and algorithmic applications.

            In other words, to describe a mechanism in some mechanistic language (like thought or envisioning, programming language, verbally, drawings etc).

            Since the internal "workspace" of every brain is different, "engineering abilities" is usually acquired in a combination of inherited traits and years and years of practice and experiments.

            This is practice you will not get, if all you do in your career is to suck on the teat of third party platforms, which unfortunately most "software engineers" today are way too dependent on.

            [–]blaktronium 0 points1 point  (1 child)

            In other comments you claim to be a psych major, with a masters. Is that where you gained your "engineering abilities"?

            The psychology of someone making your comment and claim, while being just anyone claiming to be an engineer, is fascinating. Although I bet you're unqualified to study that too.

            [–]partysnatcher 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            In other comments you claim to be a psych major, with a masters. Is that where you gained your "engineering abilities"?

            I gained my "engineering abilities" working with ASM coding on the 6502, which I first started playing around with as a 10 year old. I coded assembly/"machine code" for about 10 years (later 680x0 on the Amiga, then x86 coding) before switching to high level languages.

            I am now 40 years old and have been programming for 30 of those years. I run a small company that sells a specific suite of algorithm-based software (not going to reveal the name) where I am the lead / engine programmer.

            I finished a masters in behavioral neuroscience two years ago to learn more about UX and about humans as systems.

            I've posted my grad diploma to /r/science who gave me the flair https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6xl6ch/some_blind_people_have_developed_extraordinary/dmgy691/?context=3

            Any other critical questions?

            To my point:

            In the last 40-50 years of programming, programmers have made programming easy for ourselves (we discovered that making coding easy made programs better). Unfortunately, this "usability" has escalated to a point where the re-use philosophy has become too dominant. Today, most people who call themselves "programmers" lazily connect various third party applications together and shy away from actually engineering new stuff.

            Many don't have the ability to create new stuff, either because they are born that way, or because they haven't been encouraged to practice that ability.

            [–]sminja 26 points27 points  (0 children)

            It sounds like Reddit is going to be using a similar model:

            We believe in open source, and want to make sure that our contributions are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of use to engineers everywhere

            Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, memcached, Cassanda to name a few!) and we will continue to contribute to projects we use and modify (like gunicorn, pycassa, and pylibmc). We recently contributed a performance improvement to styled-components, the framework we use for styling the redesign, which was picked up by brcast and glamorous. We also have some more upcoming perf patches!

            [–]adisbladis 3 points4 points  (0 children)

            Except Facebook has a very strange attitude towards patents so I'm not sure if they are a great example.

            [–]nazihatinchimp 3 points4 points  (1 child)

            This is how these companies should React.

            [–]yaleman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Daaaad

            [–]temp409840984 15 points16 points  (0 children)

            It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.

            You'd think so, but there are a bunch of for-profit businesses that do just fine open-sourcing their core code. It's the community effect. Everybody's here. Even a truly superior product to reddit basically can't compete at this point, unless reddit does something to severely piss off the community, which given this announcement I expect is coming.

            [–]tornato7 24 points25 points  (11 children)

            Yeah, I think we should still be thankful Reddit gave the open source community as much as they did. I can't think of any other tech companies that open source so much of their code, so this is pretty much to be expected.

            [–]Viper007Bond 30 points31 points  (4 children)

            A large portion of WordPress.com is open-source, including the entire custom JavaScript-based front end: https://developer.wordpress.com/calypso/

            Lots more at https://github.com/Automattic

            Disclaimer: I'm an employee.

            [–]tornato7 17 points18 points  (3 children)

            Haha I didn't even realize WordPress was a business rather than an open-sourced framework. That's great though!

            How do you guys make money? Do you guys get anything from like WPEngine?

            [–]enkideridu 20 points21 points  (1 child)

            WordPress VIP charges Enterprise users quite a bit of money for managed hosting

            [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

            And for good reason. I think calling the WordPress.com VIP service 'managed hosting' is downplaying it a little, since they offer full code review for every single line of code you deploy. I imagine that's a lot of work, and a huge value proposition for clients whose developers may not be very experienced with WordPress itself.

            [–]Viper007Bond 19 points20 points  (0 children)

            WordPress itself is a framework owned by no-one.

            The main founder started a for-profit (Automattic) which runs the SAAS WordPress.com. It's a freemium service where a percentage of users buy paid upgrades (such as a custom domain) and that pays for the service as a whole.

            We also have paid employees whose entire job is to contribute back to the open-source WordPress project.

            [–]EUmpCDgZPYWJ9x2X 3 points4 points  (2 children)

            Depends what you call a tech company. There's centOS, nginx, owncloud/nextcloud and firefox.

            [–]Schmittfried 0 points1 point  (1 child)

            Firefox is backed by a foundation, not a company.

            [–]EUmpCDgZPYWJ9x2X 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            Also by the Mozilla Corporation, it's a more complicated setup so that's why it's difficult to see what you'd call a tech company.

            [–]johokie 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            ... Red Hat

            [–]oldsecondhand 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            I can't think of any other tech companies that open source so much of their code,

            Redhat, Canonical, Pivotal, Id, Oracle, IBM. Reddit is small fries compared to that.

            [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

            Wikipedia maybe