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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."
Cutting off your dick magically makes you a woman, all white people are literal nazis, #INPEACH
Whoa there. I would definitely say you have a moral right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want, in some respect. I would even go so far as to say it's moral that you should have a way for any message to be heard.
No absolutely not.
Your right to free speech does not in any way trump the right of others to not listen.
Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact).
I disagree. That's partly true, partly not. Some people believe lies, that does not make those lies the truth.
Then maybe choose to add that speech is the preferred conflict resolution method (to violence or shame) when negotiating reality of truth.
In most cases yes. In some cases no. Not all confilcts can be resolved peacefully and not all people are prepared to listen to reason.
Admittedly, competing assessments of truth cannot necessarily be completely resolved and there's a frustration with that, everyone feels.
Yes especially when one set of "truths" are outright lies designed to turn people against a particular group. See for example all the lies that Nazis (neo and otherwise) seem to believe about the Jews.
Out of this, I find that stifling speech *in any form* is immoral to that end, regardless of the legal underpinnings.
That's BS. If a guest of mine starts spouting off on how I should be gassed, then I'll kick him out of my house. That's stifling speech in some form and it is absolutely not immoral.
Feel free to invent other examples, but there are plenty of people who do in fact espouse those views about people from my background.
Trolling, fake news, or any number of other incidental and malevolent purposes are all valid ways to express truth
What? No. The definition of "truth" is not "something someone believes".
It's always useful to have an unrestrained channel of global communication
We have Tor.
Such a mechanism is not immediately available to everyone today
It's called Tor and it's available to everyone very easily.
Saying that it's immoral to have some form of unrestrained speech is a conceptual misstep, from my perspective
I don't know what you mean. Are you advocation the position that solitication of murder (a type of speech) is OK? I doubt it, but seriously I don't get your point.
SJW n. One who posts facts.