It’s Official, Reddit Goes Open Source

You’ve probably heard some buzz about reddit over the last few days with people speculating what it is they’re going to announce tonight when they meet with some of their fans at a bar in San Francisco. Yesterday they posted on their blog with an invite to their readers saying they had an announcement to make on the 18th of June and there’d be “plenty of beer, miniature hamburgers, and something else even more intoxicating and delicious…”

Once people saw the invite showing a penguin, everybody started speculating that it was either going to involve Linux, or open-source in one way or another. The party has yet to start (it’s tonight) but reddit has already announced that they are in fact going open source. We’re not sure if this means there’s something else they plan to announce tonight or if it’ll just be more of a celebration when they meet with their fans.

So about reddit going Open Source, they say this move will help them be even more transparent with their users and is a logical “next step.” They wanted to be able to give back to the community who has given them a lot, and so opening up is their way of saying thanks. A new site has been set-up where the public can go to download the code behind reddit and it’s found at http://code.reddit.com. There you’ll find everything you need to go to get started.

As Mashable points out, now that the code is available, there’s going to be a race to see who will be able to dissect it and determine how reddit works the way it does. And once that’s determined, it could mean people will try to game the system. Hopefully people will be appreciative of reddit’s decision to go open source and use the code to make the site even better.