Brij’s One More Idea

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Brij Singh’s weblog about entrepreneurship

Jun 18, 2008 Comments

Reddit goes open source with CPAL license, probably caused major LOL in Diggnation

Reddit is releasing source code of it's news voting engine. Light weight voting utility was already available in the form of Pligg, Written in Python, this can at best be a launch pad for developers to get onto Google App Engine.

Reddit announcement can be interpreted in two ways. One is that they are letting developers look inside the engine and add value-add code. Stuff like widget, trackers, analytics plugins etc come to mind immediately. 

Second motivation, important one, is to let publishers run their own news voting site. This may appeal to many big news organizations who have passive distrust with Digg like rating sites. News rating engines are prone to manipulation. Digg is famous for it's community activism. Also there are organized (Digg-gangs) attempts  to game the system. This is where Reddit's  open source card  (CPAL license is a open source play NOT AN OPEN SOURCE CODE) can be very interesting.

For larger developer community, I doubt there will be any serious NEW project based on this codebase. Like Facebook, Reddit is also using infamous CPAL license. Though Reddit fanboys (not a single mention of CPAL in 240 odd comments) don't give a shit about CPAL license.  Every developer need to think about making money, talking to lawyers and code protection etc etc at some point. Whole process is as boring as looking at your late bills.

CPAL is a motivation killer for any serious code adventure. It's works great for marketing purpose and can even get your company into all the important open source events. 

With computing model increasingly going to cloud and SaaS, it's annoying to see interesting companies creating more confusion in the market by choosing CPAL license. 

How many attribution links can you handle in your footer? This is a license to spam your website footer. If you are thinking of distributing code in open source, stick to Mozilla, BSD, or GPL v2. Even GPL v3 is pretty exhaustive in protecting all parties.

Overall it's a positive move by Reddit and will create sufficient knowledge base for interesting apps.

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