Reddit plans to killing off its main source code after nine years

Reddit

Reddit removed access to its main source code after nine years in the public domain. Access to the code was made public in 2008 as the company attempted to improve uptake of its services. But, now replaced by smaller chunks of code instead.

According to Reddit, when we open sourced Reddit back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization 1 and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do.

"Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we"ve been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date.

removes main source code

Reasons include the fact that keeping the code base public means it is more difficult to develop new features on the QT, such as the recent addition of video support. Additionally, the site is moving "further and further from the canonical state of the open source repository" and moving to a "more service-oriented architecture".

This isn"t the end though, the smaller code bases including baseplate, rollingpin, mcsauna as well as the more well known open source repositories.

This all shows a simple case of a company that has had to "pick a lane". Reddit, now being far bigger than it ever anticipated, has realized that if it intends to keep up with other forms of social interaction, it needs to evolve at its own pace.

If you need any guidance as to why that is, you need only look at Murdoch"s neglect of MySpace that essentially killed it off.

Reddit is looking to make itself attractive going forwards. Even though it claims to have no plans to have an IPO it still needs to have a value and that means taking back control. Reddit expressed concern last year after plans for closed-source mobile apps reveal.