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In what sense is SO associated with free and open source? They run a commercial project on proprietary software and I assume most questions are by students and
by johannes1234321 9y ago
In what sense is SO associated with free and open source? They run a commercial project on proprietary software and I assume most questions are by students and people working on non-open, commercial projects. True, some questions build around open source, but that's since many development stacks use openSource these days.
- exikyut 9y agoIndeed, the SO codebase itself is not open. And with good reason; there are already a thousand garbage UI clones of the site. It's clear that if the code was actually open that there would be a thousand garbage clones chock-full of terrible ads, but the UI would be so good people would actually use them. That would dilute the quality of SO itself, and render it all less significant.
- johannes1234321 9y agoSO's quality only for a small part is in the software. It's in the amount of users and Google ranking. Maybe clones would work for narrow interest groups, but have a hard time to complete full scale ...