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A comment on Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succeed?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by nostrademons on Friday September 19, 2014 @03:03PM (#8341947)
LiveJournal and Reddit both started as closed-source and went open, and it didn't kill the company. Both were already succeeding, though, so it's hard to tell whether open-sourcing their code actually helped them.

Netscape open-sourced their code as Mozilla when they started failing. Again, it's hard to tell causality, though - did they fail because they were so distracted by open-source that they couldn't react to IE? Or did they fail because the Netscape 4.7 codebase was so bad and their resources so constrained that they couldn't react to IE? And does Firefox, born out of the open-source effort, count as a "success" because it grew out of Mozilla and finally broke Microsoft's monopoly, or a failure because it was eventually eclipsed by Chrome?

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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by bmm6o on Friday September 19, 2014 @06:05PM (#8342747)
I don't know about LJ, but I get the impression that Reddit released the source just out of the desire to be "good OSS citizens", and not out of any hope that it would directly benefit the company. I would be surprised if they thought it had a measurable positive impact.
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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by daddykotex on Friday September 19, 2014 @03:48PM (#8342146)
Is Reddit really open sourced?
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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by rakoo on Friday September 19, 2014 @04:03PM (#8342211)
The code is [0], but I don't think the data is.

[0] https://github.com/reddit/reddit

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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by daddykotex on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @11:37PM (#8365465)
Wow I didn't know that, thanks
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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by charlesbzink on Friday September 19, 2014 @04:12PM (#8342250)
For the most part, yes.

Repository: https://github.com/reddit/reddit

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Re:Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succ... by zem on Friday September 19, 2014 @04:57PM (#8342457)
yes, except for things like spam filtering and voting ring detection, which they keep closed source to prevent gaming.
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