Slashdot Mirror
Reddit's Main Code Is No Longer Open Source (reddit.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an announcement from Reddit's founding engineer:
When we open sourced Reddit back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do. Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we've been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date. This is for a variety of reasons, some intentional and some not so much:
Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing. 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... We are actively moving away from the "monolithic" version of reddit that works using only the original repository... Because of these reasons, we are making the following changes to our open-source practice. We're going to archive reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile. These will still be accessible in their current state, but will no longer receive updates.
The announcement has been condensed slightly, but Reddit's founding engineer insists that "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." In addition, "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..."
"Those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn't really a change to how we're doing anything but rather making explicit what's already been going on."
Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing. 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... We are actively moving away from the "monolithic" version of reddit that works using only the original repository... Because of these reasons, we are making the following changes to our open-source practice. We're going to archive reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile. These will still be accessible in their current state, but will no longer receive updates.
The announcement has been condensed slightly, but Reddit's founding engineer insists that "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." In addition, "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..."
"Those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn't really a change to how we're doing anything but rather making explicit what's already been going on."
Imagine that: Companies only embrace open source when they benefit from it.
Cutting off your dick magically makes you a woman, all white people are literal nazis, #INPEACH
Does anybody care? I only spent five minutes researching the subject, but from what I can find virtually nobody is using Reddit's Open Source code to run their own websites.
Reddit's reasoning seems dickish -- they benefitted from being Open Source when it benefitted them, but as soon as it didn't, they decided to stop. I find their reasoning for making the code closed source specious -- does having video really give them some sort of competitive advantage? Video is hardly new on the web -- every major service already supports it. I doubt they're doing anything so new that nobody else can figure out how to do it on their own competing websites.
Sorry Reddit. It's a dick move and your reason sucks, but somehow I doubt anyone really cares all that much how your code is licensed, as virtually nobody is using it anyway.
Yaz
Why use Open Reddit when Slashdot code is easily available?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Reddit jumped the shark.
Now it's just a propaganda outlet for leftist bullshit.
Wrongthink will be punished.
Imagine the 'strategic disaster' of the broader Internet and reddit competitors finding out they were working on the innovative new feature of 'video'.
The summary may be a condensed version, but for those who want an even shorter version;
Reddit believes in using open source that others have generously made available, and they also believe in using open source for publicity during their startup phase. But now that they've matured as a company, they want to take their toys and go home, thanks.
No one. It's not even a contest, so what's the point? Backdoors are coming, and it's sad but easy to guess for who. It sounds like a bullshit excuse cooked up by a millennial. Why do Reddit users need to be "surprised" by new features? What fucked-up Facefarm API do you guys plan on using? Someone will make a fork from the code we can all see and you're going to have a OpenOffice vs LibreOffice type of split from this.
Reddit is so feature poor.
This is a complete baldfaced lie, since they could keep the code open source and branch for 'super sekrit' new features, and only push out the bugfixes to the public source repo until some period after the sekrit feature was released and was no longer competitive with their current offerings.
Providing open source versions of your code doesn't mean they always have to be the latest, and in fact many companies market based on providing updated copies of their source code licensed for a fee, then code dropping older versions some period after they are obsolete (often a year or more.)
From ghostscript, to gnat, to the former grsec, they all based their businesses around staggered releases of proprietary and open source versions of their code.
If this wasn't just a copout, reddit would've suggested something similiar.
Honestly though, from what I heard of the system specs required to run it, it was a complete doggy piece of shit to begin with. And if you really wanted a reddit-esque site there are plenty of other open source alternatives.
My personal recommendation is the onelon source code (notably used for the onelon.i2p website if you happen to use the I2P network.) It supports groups, journals, mandatory cryptographic logins, but otherwise acts very similiar to reddit. Furthermore it is written in php, relatively lightweight, and supposedly secure (so get at it kiddies and prove it is not!)
At least this pitiful excuse at an excuse was:
"Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear""
Know what? It's open only to customers. You can develop this in the dark all you like, when you release it to the public, Open Source it. Job done. This was just a lame-ass nonreason made up to do something you think you need to do because,well, you have new people in from established businesses with certain ideas along with their money and/or expertise. Including BS.
It's a shame voat is just a far right mirror image of the far left toxicity that is Reddit.
Rumors abound that Digg is going to buy reddit and call it rediggit
rewriting history since 2109
THIS is why the AGPL is so important.
They wouldn't be able to close off their changes. Think of how the world would be different if the AGPL existed for TiVo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, ....
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Your other link was probably intended to be this site. They also have a GitHub page. The code itself is written in PHP in a procedural style, which in 2017 is offensively poor practice. No one should ever use that code under any circumstances, and in a just world the author would be legally enjoined from pursuing this profession.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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On a tech reddit forum yesterday and hit 'more'. That simple request for older threads failed - multiple times, as the program claimed to find nothing. More SJW coding- I mean who needs that 'white' male 'nerd' when some self-promoting fake with the right physical form appears to have more acceptable 'social' 'skills'. Sigh.
More and more often I come across failures in 'janet and john' levels of coding on major sites. Proof that SJW employment rules re:coders are working as the Deep State demands. And no- these SJW type coders will not get better with time- it doesn't work like that. If they are thick and hateful of the profession on day one, their ambition is to rise to a management position over REAL coders ASAP.
Open Source has one main problem- others can look at the code and code progress. Reddit now wants to SJW its code dev- and then outsource essential code projects when their inhouse SJW coders inevitably FAIL. All failing empires end up relying on real engineering talent in outlying regions of the Empire- so mega-corruption can rule in the heartland.
The political subs on Reddit are literally Deep State assets- tools of the CIA, MI6 etc. On the Syrian War sub, for instance, news reports from non-western media outlets are labelled as 'propaganda' in the header. It is that unsubtle and orwellian.
So sorry guys, open source is going to be demonised as the 'playground' of 'alt-right' approved 'white' male coders.
so they can hide the bad think
This.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No one cares about your fucking strategy except my bots.
Congratulations.
You, and other tards like you, have made Slashdot comments unreadable and worthless. You're not only utterly wrong, you're also so far off topic that every other post on this article will be nothing but noise.
Please kill yourself. You're as much of a disaster as Drumpf himself.
NSA bots dive
Such a tight community.
Finds so many pearls.
Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact).
What is the difference between truth and fact? Is the above statement a truth (Truth?) or is it a fact? Is this fact true?
(You may want to brush up on your epistemology.)
A huge part in learning and discovery is to see what is wrong. We learn by trial and error from birth. When we want attention, we make lots of noise. When we want a different type of attention, we smile. We learn that if nobody is looking, they can't see the smile so we learn to make vocal sounds to get their attention and then smile. We learn that 2 apples and 2 pears is not 89 pieces of fruit, it's 4. And no matter what types of fruits we count, addition always works. Seeing right and wrong, or correct and incorrect, is how we not only learn, but learn to inquire.
Has a couple thousand years of Religious doctrine and wars not shown you that silencing dissenting opinions is not just a bad idea, but a hopeless endeavor? Ideas, both right and wrong, always make it to inspection. The fastest way to kill off bad ideas is by exposing them for review, because this is how humans learn and grow. The fastest way to propagate bad ideas is by making it taboo. Companies that make money selling information do a disservice by censoring. The fact that they may be "legal" to do so is quite beside the point.
Do you see now why people like you, and with similar mindsets to you, have created a generation of kids all f&$ked up in schools? Do you see why we are regressing instead of progressing in education? Probably not, but I have to try.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But what is the alternative?
Basically FOSS is the alternative. We have usenet/nntp. That or an equivalent dentralized foundation platform is all that is needed. Unfortunately ISPs persecute home server operators which kind of screwed us all over in favor of a set of recentralized fiefdoms like reddit(in place of usenet/nntp), twitter (in place of irc), facebook (in place of blogging with social friend lists access control lists), etc. As time goes on, more and more people will get wise as to the value of cutting out the centralized middleserver (prism magnet).
And complain all you want about the historical problems with usenet, but they were all minor problems that would be solved by FOSS faster than you can sneeze if the FCC assured all residential subscribers that their personal NNTP server traffic could not be discriminated against compared with people's traffic uploading cat videos to youtube.
The only real reason Reddit is no longer Open Source, is because they don't want the world to see their algorithms used to censor voices they don't like. To be very specific, their rewrite their algorithms to ensure that r/the_donald doesn't hit the front page. They have also implemented these modifications on individual posts within threads to make a particular viewpoint not seem popular; posts that would have 1500 up votes are reduced to just under 20. If a post that Reddit hates, proves to be too popular in spite their skewed algorithms, they automatically delete the post and often times the thread underneath it. If you only knew, Reddit's censorship is Orwellian.
Reddit is shit, they don't hire any Americans and the Americans they might accidentally hire do not, in anyway, represent actual Americans across the rest of the country. There is zero collaboration across racial, gender, political and cultural divides at all at Reddit; not a single shred. For example of Reddit's intolerance and lack of diversity, I know one of their employees who is able to get people on board, and this person has and will refuse to hire anyone who so much as admits they "like America".
We dont want people to find out our clusterfucks before we release them.
Probably because they're going to become even more blatant in their efforts against wrongthink.
Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed
That means: We now are ruled by investors and we are part of the problem now.
Smoking pepper-balls.
If reddit's employees do not top this, they are pu***'s
Will Reddit take their hits to the balls for PUBLICITY!?
Godaddy's pepper-balls, vs reddit's ????-balls, my intuition say's it's probably just going to be great slime balls, but we'll see they could be "missing balls" and you wouldn't want to miss that.
it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing
What?
Also, since when did reddit do any meaningful work on their code? Have they added a feature at some point in the last few years? Did I miss something?
Just sayin'
they could easily develop their secret features behind closed doors and release it OSS once it's ready. there is nothing in the OSS license that prevents them from doing this.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
By the numbers, there are less than 100,000 people belonging to any group listed as a "White Supremacist" group in the US. Or less than .03% of the population. Many of those are not "actual Nazis", but even assuming they are it's not a very big or dangerous group and has not grown by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, they have a Constitutional right to voice their opinions and people believing that we all have Constitutional rights is correct and legal, not incorrect.
Conversely, there are approximately 500,000-1,000,000 members of antifa and blm (hard to get actual numbers from any source but these seem realistic based on activity). This group has been growing because people on the left don't call them out. They are not voicing an opinion, they are a violent group who breaks the law regularly. I, and people on the "Right" (which is strangely anything right of Trotsky today) support their right to speech but denounce calls to action of violence which is illegal. They are marxist thugs, who's primary position and purpose is destruction.
In your own words, you and people on the left are at a minimum less-brave marxist thugs. We could say however, that your silence about this group which hovers on the terrorist watch list is being supported in many ways by the left. At least the white supremacist groups get negative media coverage and denounced by every politician ever asked about these groups.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Why do they make such a big deal about being able to hide the fact that they're working on video? Who cares? Is that really a big trade secret that their competitors are going to act on? Develop it in the clear! Let people know it's what you're working on!
Slashdot comments are just like Reddit comments now. I stooped reading Reddit because I got tired of having to scroll down through 7 pages of shit to get to relevant comments. Slashdot is now the same.
If the Nazis won, there would be genocide. If Black Lives Matter won, police officers would be killed and lawlessness would prevail. BLM and Antifa are staged marxist movements, and a very big problem. Nazis are a problem, but there are very few of them.
My position is based on facts, see the dozens of innocent police officers shot and killed (some execution style) by people believing the blm/antifa rhetoric. See the attacks against police dogs, horses, families, homes, etc... if innocent police officers. I can't fix your delusions, only point them out.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.