jun 18
2008

Open Source Apps

The news that Reddit is going open-source got me thinking about other sites that have done the same. The three other examples I could come up with are Slashdot, LiveJournal, and Consumating. All seem to be, well, increasingly obsolete. (A different debate might be does Slashdot still matter? I'm sure it's audience is still sizable, but does it matter?) Are there any better examples? And who would benefit from this, if anyone?

7 comments

And does anyone remember how Facebook accidentally released all of its source code last year? I still think it's floating around out there, but no one has done anything with it that I know of...

posted by Rex at 3:14 PM on June 18, 2008

when is fimoculous going open source?

posted by adm at 4:08 PM on June 18, 2008

Hah! That's funny. For the four people in America who still use ColdFusion!

posted by Rex at 4:10 PM on June 18, 2008

crap, that's the joke i was going to make next.

posted by adm at 4:15 PM on June 18, 2008

I love the fact that fimoculous.com is written in Coldfusion. It's the tech equivalent of wearing an 80s rock t-shirt (or, insert something cool here if that's not actually retro-cool anymore -- I can't keep track).

If Hypercard could somehow be a web technology I'd be ALL over it.

posted by robin at 5:40 PM on June 18, 2008

P.S. To the substantive point: Agree -- and I think it's a pile of code isn't actually good for much. Open source only works when there's a community of active contributors involved too -- and none of these projects have had any luck building those. (Or even appeared to try very hard, really.)

posted by robin at 5:42 PM on June 18, 2008

LiveJournal has had active contributors, but in recent years the management hasn't cared. SUP has started taking community patches again recently. There's also several competing sites set up using the code, and new company announced recently to bring the code up to date: http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/226141.html
Wordpress is also largely based on open source, although key parts of the wordpress.com code aren't. Actually, wordpress.com is becoming like a worse version of LiveJournal, what with buying Gravatar and site-wide logins.

Slashdot doesn't matter to the general population, now that the internet is more than just geeks (see also: User Friendly), but for tech stories it can be influential.

posted by James at 3:15 AM on June 19, 2008




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