Reddit goes open source

On Tuesday, the Reddit team announced that it is releasing its source code to the public. For those of you who don’t know what Reddit is, it is a hugely popular Social News site, much like Digg or our local Muti. This is an outstanding move in that users not only drive the content on the site, but could now actually develop the site.

They are not the first, nor will they be the last, I’m sure, but you’ve got to love the reasons they give for this move:

Faster development — They hope with community involvement, bugs and features would be implemented much quicker. It may well be! I know of a dozen developers that would love to tinker with their code. That’s to say if time allows it, of course!

Total transparency — A lot has been said about the Digg algorithm and a lot of Digg users question their algorithm. No-one outside of Digg seems 100% sure of how it works. There have been plenty of pretty good and accurate guesses. Point is, this has been a bane of many a Digg user. Reddit throws it wide open telling you exactly how their algorithm works. One cannot help but wonder if the idiots of the self-promotion world are not going to try their damned best to exploit this. Fortunately, according to my first point, the algorithm can change faster than they can try to exploit. (Read: http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=99 )

They love open source! — Don’t we all? As they mention, “Reddit is built on open source products. The only part of Reddit that’s not open source, is Reddit itself”. Kudos! Giving back is such a noble gesture.

Now, before you start to think that we’re going to see the online space flooded with Reddit clones, based on Reddit code itself, there is a catch…

They are releasing it under a special kind of license which basically states that all changes to the code base must be made available to everyone else and you have to say on your site that you are using Reddit to power your social news site. Not that this would prevent a lot of people, I’m sure. Good luck to them though!