Reddit Inc was a ragtag group and the fate of the company was very vague. We needed to make sure the community could hold the site alive should the company go below and making the code accessible was the reasonable thing to do. Nine years later and Reddit is a very assorted company and as anyone who has been giving attention will have noticed, we’ve been giving a bad job of running our open-source product repos up to date. This is a shift of reasons, some intended and some not so much:
Open-source gets it hard for us to reveal some features “in the clear” (like our modern video launch) without dropping our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a bigger player on the web, it is hard for us to be important in our planning when everyone can see what language we are committing. Because of the superior, our internal development, production and “feature” branches have been running further and further from the “official” state of the open source repository… We are actively moving continuously from the “monolithic” version of Reddit that works using only the original repository… Because of these reasons, we are performing the following changes to our open-source practice. We’re going to archive Reddit/Reddit and Reddit/Reddit-mobile. These will still be available in their current state, but will no long-drawn receive updates.
The letter has been compressed slightly, but Reddit’s founding builder insists that “We believe in open source, and want to make certain that our offerings are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of value to engineers everywhere.” In addition, “Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, Memcached, Cassandra to name a few!) and we will stay to contribute to schemes we use and modify…”
“Those who have been giving attention will realize that this isn’t really a move to how we’re doing anything but rather make explicit what’s already been going on.”
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