Podiobooks 2.0 Will Be Open Source
I’m happy to announce that the next iteration of the Podiobooks.com codebase will be an open source project, released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. We’re redesigning the system from the ground up, taking lessons learned from the last four years and folding them into a fresh batch of binary goodness for all you folks to enjoy.
Why go Open Source?
As the years have rolled by we’ve seen that opening things to a community is a better way to build quality. We’re amazed and humbled by the contributions of both our authors and our members. We would not be as strong as we are now without them.
If community passion and commitment has carried us this far, why not be more transparent and get everyone involved on the next iteration of the web site? There are talented people out there, from copy editors to codemonkeys to folks who excel at finding our bugs. Keeping the codebase a closed system is a dead end. Opening it up is the only way to go.
On a personal note, I have always been supportive of open source software, even though I’ve not been able to contribute to a serious project. This is also my way of giving something back to the community of developers, from whom I have learned so much of the years. I’m hoping that, in years to come, people will learn from our code the same way I have learned from the people who came before me.
How do I learn more, or contribute?
You can follow the progress of the project in two ways:
- A project log is available on our Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/podiobooks
- The source itself is hosted at Github: http://github.com/ctmiller/podiobooks/tree/master
If you have an interest in contributing to the project, please contact chris at podiobooks dot com.
Current Project Details:
January 21st, 2009 at 11:27 pm
This is cool. Time to start digging in some code.
February 7th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Creative Commons is a somewhat curious choice for code. Would something like the AGPL (Affero General Public License) not be more suitable?