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."

Comments

Neither is Slashdot's

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine that: Companies only embrace open source when they benefit from it.

Re:Neither is Slashdot's

[ShanghaiBill]

Imagine that: Companies only embrace open source when they benefit from it.

Companies are often poor at deciding what is in their best interest. Reddit's explanation is that going closed source will allow them to do secret stuff. But is keeping secrets really beneficial? Might it not be better to discuss changes openly, and get feedback from users, before committing development time?

I once worked for a company that was considering going open source. There was huge internal opposition from people that feared giving away the "crown jewels" and allowing competitors to "steal" code. After months of debate, we went ahead and opened everything up.

Over the next year, we had a total of this many downloads: 0.

Was anyone using it?

[Yaztromo]

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

Re:Was anyone using it?

[ModernGeek]

It does show a huge culture shift. I remember making a snarky comment about starting a new site because they did something stupid, and the current owner/admin of the site replied to my comment with something like, "Well then you better start with our codebase then!"

It's something about how bubbly/happy/engaged/accommodating their admin staff was, was just .. infuriating; it also somehow kept me on the site. Today is now another story, with rampant censorship, vote manipulation, and a site-wide hive-mind mentality that's enforced by the admins themselves. Their utopian hands-off philosophy love-your-enemy philosophy has morphed into some weird dystopian-esque love me or leave me world where censorship is seen as a virtue.

Re:Was anyone using it?

[Jack9]

> So yes the system works and no you have no legal, moral or ethical right to say whatever you want where ever you want whenever you want.

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.

Truth is relative (truth is not the same as fact). Personal truth is based on experiences, biology, psychology, etc. Then maybe choose to add that speech is the preferred conflict resolution method (to violence or shame) when negotiating reality of truth. Admittedly, competing assessments of truth cannot necessarily be completely resolved and there's a frustration with that, everyone feels. Out of this, I find that stifling speech *in any form* is immoral to that end, regardless of the legal underpinnings. It's an integral part of our practical efforts to progress toward some resolution of truths, for the human culture at large.

Granted, many articulations (shitposting), are not practically, philosophically or even temporally useful. There's a moral truth that emerges from that observation...among many others, that would not necessarily be identifiable if we interfered with a series of filters or qualifications. A complex enough logical system has an indeterminate end state, per the halting problem. Trolling, fake news, or any number of other incidental and malevolent purposes are all valid ways to express truth (discovery of fraud is the revelation of the weakness of systems, paradoxically). People's interpretation of reality relies on feedback loops regardless of how frustrating our conceptual mismatches along the way.

I whittle down my feelings to a single assertion that's relevant to the subject. "It's always useful to have an unrestrained channel of global communication". Such a mechanism is not immediately available to everyone today and reddit is obviously not a suitable proxy for that axiom. Saying that it's immoral to have some form of unrestrained speech is a conceptual misstep, from my perspective. I think we're slowly correcting it in a haphazard crucible of tests in the internet over time. The idea that the internet routes around censorship might be seen as a metaphor for the actions of progressively moral individuals, to that end YMMV

Re:Was anyone using it?

[drinkypoo]

No, I did not. - "a way for any message to be heard" is not the same as "anyone should have to listen".

Yes, yes it is.

One is an available channel, the other is a forced acceptance of content (or something?).

No, you're missing it; that's my point. What you have a right to is the right to share your message with anyone who wants it; you have the right to speech, and not the right to be heard. It's like the difference between implication and inference. The speaker implies; the listener infers. The speaker speaks; the listener hears. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to force others to hear. And that is why you don't have the right to force any particular communications channel to carry your message, and you don't have the right to scream in people's faces. There's really no meaningful difference.

Why bother?

[kamapuaa]

Why use Open Reddit when Slashdot code is easily available?

Re: Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's code is NOT easily available. In fact, it's not available at all. The code that you can download is from 2009. No additional updates have been released to the public. For all intents and purposes, Slashdot's code is closed source.

There is a fork called SoylentNews, which has modernized Slash. However, that code has substantial differences from what you see on Slashdot. That's as close as you're going to get to a modern version of Slash.

The management could very easily make Slashdot's code open source again. It was hosted on Sourceforge. It would be a meaningful gesture toward restoring trust in Sourceforge if Slashdot released its code there. This is actually one of the easiest ways for Slashdot management to regain trust with users, but it hasn't happened.

I strongly advise against using the 2009 code on Slashcode. It probably won't work very well on a modern Linux system, plus there may well be vulnerabilities and other bugs in the 2009 code that you don't want on a website. If you want a Slashdot-like site, please use the SoylentNews code instead.

Re: Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soylent news supports unicode, so we know its not the same code as slashdot.

Re: Why bother?

[sg_oneill]

Psssst there are more countries than America

Re: Why bother?

[MMC Monster]

True, but it's generally good to build on the work of others rather than re-make the same mistakes.

There was another guy who made a modern forum system from scratch in the style of slashdot. I believe he made the source available as well. The forum is http://pipedot.org/ . The software is available at http://pipedot.org/ .

Re: Why bother?

[MMC Monster]

Opps. The source is available at https://pipecode.org/ .

Re: Why bother?

[Nicopa]

There are more countries in America, even.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Reddit jumped the shark.
Now it's just a propaganda outlet for leftist bullshit.

Wrongthink will be punished.

Re:Meh

[bn-7bc]

Hmm, the ftont psge maby, but I frequent several sub reddits /r/ipv6 , /r/postgresql, /r/irc, /r/blackmagicdesign, and I might have missed it but I’ve not seen any leftist propaganda , nor any evidence of a reddit hive mind mentioned earler in the comments. Well I tend to miss things, or are thise sub reddits I mentioned not thst politicsl / borg like? Input apreciated have a nice day

Re:Meh

[AmiMoJo]

But what is the alternative? Voat isn't very popular, quickly devolved into a cesspit and bans any wrongthink left leaning boards.

Same with PewTube. The number one video on that site was about communism, and was quickly banned along with all left leaning channels.

Seems to be like you can have Reddit which allows 99.9% of material including some very extreme stuff like the "incel" boards and far right politics, or you can have a right wing echo chamber that bans anything contrary to the approved narrative.

Well, I heard

[JustOK]

Rumors abound that Digg is going to buy reddit and call it rediggit

false reason

[sad_]

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.