Gutsy move from reddit

Reddit made a bold move yesterday and released their source code under the CPAL open source license. I'm a fan of reddit's programming section and will be interested to see how this effects the long term success of reddit.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch rightly points out that “it is not the technology that makes sites like Digg or Reddit successful. It is the people who use them.” Despite that, I hope that this move helps reddit gain some popularity.

Regardless of popularity, it will be interesting to watch the community respond with the new features and fixes they contribute. Hopefully someone will fix the shared gripe I have with the frequency duplicate content is promoted across the site. Being open-source means I or any other community member could theoretically address this ourselves. However, like myself, I expect most people are hoping somebody else does it.

BTW, reddit isn't the first popular social news site to go open source. Slashdot has had it's source code, 'Slash', available for years through Slashcode.