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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Reddit Goes Open Source

image Reddit today announced that they're open sourcing reddit. 'Open-source' means that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download. Developer can download the source code and play around that.

Reddit is unique in the social news scene and has a huge community of developers.  Reddit expects that the developer can help them in improving the site and their technology. Every library, tool and platform reddit uses is now open to all. Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. Finally they are giving back to the community.

In no particular order, here's a quick list of the open source products that reddit is built and runs upon:

Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

The reddit development site is located here: http://code.reddit.com

Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain the documentation wiki.

All reddit code is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, which is basically the Mozilla license with a handful of changes. Specifically, the CPAL stipulates that when running reddit's code publicly, any changes to the code must be made available publicly and the site must make clear that it is running reddit code.

There are a few portions of the code that reddit is keeping with them which is mostly related to anti-cheating/spam protection.

Alexis, answering the question of what exactly he does here, has made a cute video:

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