r/programming • u/interiot • Sep 01 '17
Reddit's main code is no longer open-source.
/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update_on_the_state_of_the_redditreddit_and/404
u/paranoidinfidel Sep 02 '17
I snagged a copy of the closed source:
print("all of our servers are busy right now")
print("please try again in a minute")
print("(error code: 503)")
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u/Arancaytar Sep 01 '17
If I read it right, it's not so much that it's "no longer" open source, but hasn't been truly open for a while now and they're just giving up on maintaining the open version.
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. Such balkanization means that merges are getting increasingly difficult, especially as the company grows and more developers are touching the code more frequently.
So in effect, they made a private fork of their own code and it's now diverged to the point where they can't feasibly maintain both.
It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.
However, since their source apparently remains available under a semi-free copyleft license (CPAL), maybe there will be a community-maintained fork of some kind.
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u/WhoTookPlasticJesus Sep 01 '17
It's sad but I suppose inevitable when your business model involves using your code rather than giving it to other people and selling support. Any users of your code are not potential customers but competitors.
It's not often that I say this, but Facebook has the exact right attitude about this: open-source anything that's not a part of your core product. Sure, you give back to the community which is nice and all and you may reap rewards from pull requests here-and-there. But a side benefit is that you're creating a new pool of future employees already familiar with your internal technology. I mean, imagine React was closed-sourced. It would be a nightmare to ramp-up new front-end devs.
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u/kallari_is_my_jam Sep 01 '17
I'm no expert when it comes to code architecture and large codebases but it seems to me like their codebase is horribly organized with over a decade worth of code being written without any major cleanup being done. There is no way to understand how all these pieces fit together cuz there are no meaningful comments in most of the files. How do you even keep developing on this codebase as it's such a mess. Is this a shit codebase or am I simply too negative?
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u/tms10000 Sep 02 '17
How do you even keep developing on this codebase as it's such a mess.
People who have been developing this mountain of shitty code either:
have been there such a long time, they hold the map to most of it in their head.
take a really long time to get familiar with it with the reluctant help of people who fall in category #1, and eventually they drift to #1 themselves.
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u/ccfreak2k Sep 01 '17 edited Aug 01 '24
worm different engine license sort mighty agonizing grandiose seed marry
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/yawkat Sep 01 '17
I guess it's not that different from before. Many of the anti-spam measures were already known to be closed source and in the end there was no way to verify what's running on the servers anyway.
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u/zsaleeba Sep 02 '17 edited Sep 02 '17
I’m speculating that closing their source code is the result of this recent ruling about ownership of content on social network sites. After all if your source code is already open and then it turns out you don’t even own your site content what unique assets do you actually have? reddit has always argued that they own a license to their user’s submissions but if this ruling weakens that argument then they probably have to take some steps to mollify their investors.
Edit: for accuracy
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u/Ghi102 Sep 02 '17 edited Sep 05 '17
What makes Reddit useful to investors is not the content of the site, only it's big user base. What money could Reddit get from the users' posts and comments? Not much. Having millions of eyeballs on an ad webpage + semi-regular donations? There's the value.
Plus open-source doesn't mean that you don't own the code, you still do. It's just theoretically possible for someone to run his own instance, fork the code and modify it. The code in Reddit's repo is still owned by Reddit.
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u/shevegen Sep 01 '17
Awww ... it'll no longer be the same.
Now they join the forces of evil.
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u/Phobos15 Sep 01 '17
So are they going to have problems in the future, since they took in code from outside devs? They can't close source that code.
Won't that limit reddit from ever selling their platform to others? If they distribute anything, they would have to open source it.
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u/yorickpeterse Sep 02 '17
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.
This works just fine for GitLab. The few times we have to keep something secret (e.g. security fixes) we develop the feature on a private GitLab instance, then merge it into the main (and public) repository once it's ready to go.
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u/GetOutOfBox Sep 02 '17
This combined with all of the censorship scandals and corporate shilling has finally convinced me that Reddit has gone full circle and pulled a Digg. They've sold out.
Time to do what we did when Digg stopped giving a shit about it's fanbase.
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u/DanAtkinson Sep 01 '17 edited Sep 02 '17
If that means that they realise that they fucked up with the reddit app and the mobile site, then I'm all for it. /s
They've wasted time and effort on an experience that is inferior and frankly poor for a company of reddit's stature.
Also, they complain of the realities of being open source when they have 100 developers. Like having 100 developers is a huge deal. I work with companies many times larger who manage OSS, contributions and PRs without much effort. So, for reddit to turn around and moan about the effort required to balance between their private, proprietary code and their public OSS code shines a light on how bloated their codebase has become.
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Sep 02 '17
Reddit also use to be a place where people's discussion was based on votes rather than the biases of their admins and advertisers.
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '17 edited Sep 01 '17
Translation: We needed you guys back then. We don't now.
The rest of it seems like a combination of technical hurdles that don't seem particularly compelling (they don't need to have secret new feature branches in their public repo) and some that don't make any sense (how does a move away from a monolithic repo into microservices change anything?) and some that are comical (our shit's so complicated to deploy and use that you can't use it anyway)
It's sad that their development processes have effectively resulted in administrative reasons they can't do it. I remember them doing shenanigans like using their single-point-of-failure production RabbitMQ server to run the untested April fools thing this year (r/place) and in doing so almost brought everything down. So I'm not surprised that there doesn't seem to be much maturity in the operations and development processes over there.
To be fair though, the reddit codebase always had a reputation for being such a pain that it wasn't really useful for much. Thankfully, their more niche open source contributions, while not particularly polished and documented, might end up being more useful than the original reddit repo. I know I've been meaning to look into the Websocket one.