Reddit Goes Open Source

by Mike Gunderloy - Jun. 18, 2008Comments (4)

Social news site reddit has joined the ranks of open source projects today, releasing nearly all of its source code on a new developers' site. Reddit isn't the largest of the social news sites, but thanks to its structure (with strong coverage of software news) it has a strong following of software developers.

The move makes sense for reddit, in as much as it is built on top of open source technology (including Python, PostgreSQL, memcached, Solr, and other tools). It's already easy to create personalized reddit sub-sites, so the code will likely be of the most interest to those who want to look for behind-the-firewall uses - or those who want to contribute back to the main project.

It's worth noting that reddit's ultimate corporate parent is Condé Nast. It's nice, to see a mainstream media company swimming in the open source pool. The code is licensed under the CPAL, requiring attribution in the form of a tag line, graphic, and link for publicly-deployed sites. That's the same license that Facebook used for its open source release: a few more companies on that particular bandwagon, and we can start calling it the default Web 2.0 open source license.


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4 Comments
 

CPAL is crap. This is just another example of people jumping on the Open Source bandwagon purely to get some buzz

0 Votes

why is cpal crap? if FB and reddit are using it then surely some strategic reasoning went into this, right?

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I wonder how this stacks up against Pligg - the Open Source digg clone.

0 Votes

Of course, pligg is in php and Reddit is in Python. Plus, Pligg is GPL, so, you can host it and skin it as you like. CPAL for Reddit might be a bit more restrictive...

0 Votes
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