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Being written in PHP is not important. I edited the title to remove that. I saw the page's title was: "<title>Coordino - Home - A FREE PHP StackOverflow Clone<

by NTH 15y ago

Being written in PHP is not important. I edited the title to remove that. I saw the page's title was: "<title>Coordino - Home - A FREE PHP StackOverflow Clone</title>" and just automatically included "PHP" in the HN submission without thinking terribly much about it. A QA forum is not off limits. You are correct that they are not trying to hide that it's a SE clone. Maybe it's legal, but it feels kinda gross to me to make a shoddy knockoff of someone else's innovation. I say it's "crappy" because it feels less responsive and lacks polish compared to the real thing. The formatting is oddly jumbled. For example, on InterviewStreet's installation (http://discuss.interviewstreet.com/ http://discuss.interviewstreet.com/), questions have some upvote count on the main page, but when you view that question directly, the upvote count is 0.

billpatrianakos 15y ago
Well that's fair enough. I didn't really mean to go off on you or anything but I just felt like there was this pattern I notice around here sometimes. And I'm speaking generally here so what I'm about to say ismt directed at any one person, it's really for all of us including me because I've been very guilty of it sometimes too. Sometimes I'll see someone talk about some open source project and call it shitty and tear it apart needlessly. We all need to remember that not every project starts out great. The creators put a lot of time and energy into giving us something that we could all use and even expand on for free. It might not be the greatest piece of software but bugs can be fixed and we should appreciate that someone gave us a head start on making something amazing from it. Not every open source clone is bad. Clone != unethical or shitty. Sometimes it does but not always. I know for a fact that there are a ton of people looking for a self hosted StackOverflow style forum out there and I'm glad someone made it and open sourced it. It's one thing if the creator is out promoting the thing like its great but really isn't but I don't think it's fair to come across something like this and call it crappy and I've seen it a bunch. Maybe we can do better, maybe not. If we can then we should go ahead and do it instead of tearing down others. There's a running trend of hackers having to be the smartest person in the room all the time and that's just silly. I much prefer being the dumbest guy in the room, climbing the ranks to be the smartest, then switching to another room where I'm the dumbest again. That's how you grow as a person and a developer. And one more interesting thing I see is this: a person will go off on how all software should be open source and piracy is okay because of x, y, and z but then turn around and attack an open source clone of something. How does that make sense? And we all do it whether we admit it or not. Before we do it again let's use our judgement and really think about whether it's appropriate in the situation. Put yourself in the other person's shoes and then speak.

by NTH 15y ago

billpatrianakos 15y ago

Well that's fair enough. I didn't really mean to go off on you or anything but I just felt like there was this pattern I notice around here sometimes. And I'm speaking generally here so what I'm about to say ismt directed at any one person, it's really for all of us including me because I've been very guilty of it sometimes too. Sometimes I'll see someone talk about some open source project and call it shitty and tear it apart needlessly. We all need to remember that not every project starts out great. The creators put a lot of time and energy into giving us something that we could all use and even expand on for free. It might not be the greatest piece of software but bugs can be fixed and we should appreciate that someone gave us a head start on making something amazing from it. Not every open source clone is bad. Clone != unethical or shitty. Sometimes it does but not always. I know for a fact that there are a ton of people looking for a self hosted StackOverflow style forum out there and I'm glad someone made it and open sourced it. It's one thing if the creator is out promoting the thing like its great but really isn't but I don't think it's fair to come across something like this and call it crappy and I've seen it a bunch. Maybe we can do better, maybe not. If we can then we should go ahead and do it instead of tearing down others. There's a running trend of hackers having to be the smartest person in the room all the time and that's just silly. I much prefer being the dumbest guy in the room, climbing the ranks to be the smartest, then switching to another room where I'm the dumbest again. That's how you grow as a person and a developer. And one more interesting thing I see is this: a person will go off on how all software should be open source and piracy is okay because of x, y, and z but then turn around and attack an open source clone of something. How does that make sense? And we all do it whether we admit it or not. Before we do it again let's use our judgement and really think about whether it's appropriate in the situation. Put yourself in the other person's shoes and then speak.