In a recent announcement, the company expressed its future plans to ditch the open source model and restrict the public access to the website’s “monolithic code.” As a result, the company is archiving its reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile GitHub repositories. They’ll continue to remain available in their current state, and no further updates will be added.
Why did Reddit take this step?
Reddit has given a variety of reasons to justify this move. The company has said that today Reddit is a very different company and it’s doing a bad job keeping the open source product repositories updated.
Moreover, according to the statement, it’s becoming tougher for the company to develop features, strategize, and keep them a secret as everyone can see what code is being committed.
As Reddit grows, its internal production code and the open source code have been moving further apart from each other. The company notes that as Reddit is becoming more service-oriented, it’s being divided into many smalls repositories. This division is making it difficult for the people to run a functional installation of Reddit.
The reception of this change has been positive in the open source community. In the subreddits like Open Source, Linux, etc., the users didn’t find Reddit’s reasoning worthy.
On the other hand, Reddit has promised to keep contributing to the open source world and release more open source tools in the future. Talking about the open source alternatives of Reddit itself, you can try Voat.
What are your views regarding this change? Don’t forget to share your views.
