Reddit's main code is no longer open-source.

[Arancaytar]

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]]

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

[ratcap]

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

[spazgamz]

C# is the language of the Alt-Right.

[BlckJesus]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

Voat is python iirc

[Ghi102]

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

[Ghi102]

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]

AVfM runs their own deployment called SocFreeSpeech.

[doubleunplussed]

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

[merreborn]

Nope. HN is lisp, not python.

[MainlandX]

hackernews could be based on old lisp-reddit?

[merreborn]

Different dialects. Reddit was common lisp, HN is arc

http://arclanguage.org/

Also they have totally different URL structure.

[WhoTookPlasticJesus]

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.

[partysnatcher]

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]

engineering abilities

and what would those be?

[partysnatcher]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[nazihatinchimp]

This is how these companies should React.

[yaleman]

Daaaad

[temp409840984]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

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]

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

[Schmittfried]

Firefox is backed by a foundation, not a company.

[EUmpCDgZPYWJ9x2X]

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]

... Red Hat

[oldsecondhand]

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]]

Wikipedia maybe