[moot]

> 4chan has had a lot of beautiful code submitted by volunteers every year. It's a shame to keep it all locked up.

All of our codebase (the core application and related tools) has been closed-source from day one. Not sure what you're referring to.

[robobro]

> All of our codebase ... has been closed-source from day one.

Yes. Why? The imageboard community is full of awful scripts. Yotsuba has a lot of really wonderful features. It would be great for the world if you were to release Yotsuba on Github or something.

Futallaby isn't closed source, BTW.

[ctb_mg]

I think moot was pondering why you were claiming there are many volunteer contributions to 4chan's code, when 4chan's code and tools have been closed source (i.e.: presumably in-house developed only) since the start.

[aliakbarkhan]

Why do you think the 4chan source would be any less awful? If you're really curious you can look at the partial source that leaked a while back, but IIRC it's not exactly amazing. (I'm paranoid, so I won't link to it but it's trivial to find with Google.) Edit: Just saw that you've already seen it. Nonetheless, my other points still stand.

At any rate, I don't think we'll be seeing an open source release of the 4chan source in the near future. Obviously I don't know the specifics, but in my experience it seems like most purpose-built internal applications like the 4chan imageboard tend to be rather messy and filled with a lot of very specific code that's hard to repurpose for more general use. In order to release it publicly, the codebase has to be sanitized of private information, disentangled from any internal utilities or applications, refactored to remove ugly hacks that solve one-off problems (ex. legacy integration), and so on. Then they have to switch 4chan itself over to the new codebase if they ever hope to keep the public repo up to date. That's a lot of work for 4chan's volunteer labor force, on top of what they already have to expend to maintain the site.

There's also a good likelihood that the volunteers who contributed to the code have not done so in a way that would allow moot to release the source. I am not a lawyer so I can't speak confidently about this, but I'm pretty sure copyright is a major issue here. Unless every volunteer contributor has explicitly agreed to allow their code to be released or directly assigned copyright to moot, the first prerequisite to an FOSS release would probably be to get that permission from every contributor, both past and present. The present contributors may not be that hard to ask, but given the nature of 4chan I wouldn't be surprised if a few past volunteers have worked under personas they've since abandoned, effectively making them unreachable.

[danford]

It seems to me it may just be that maintaining an open source project might be a little harder than maintaining something that is closed source simply because the maintainers can maintain it at their leisure, rather than having to deal with what comes with having a large open source project. 4chan is probably enough of a time sink for moot as it is.

Personally I believe 4chan seems like a good candidate for the MEAN stack. A lot of the features and boards could be coded as modules and it seems like it would be a lot easier to maintain, but of course this is mostly speculation. What might be cool is if 4chan/moot sanctioned an opensource project (or had a competition) to see if users could create a good open source "foundation" for 4chan and other image boards, then open sourced what was built off of that. I know 4chan has been "re-written" but I imagine some of the code is still original and I don't think any one expects it to be "professional quality" simply because it was written by someone who was (probably) completely new to web coding, so I can see why it may not make since to open source what they have already because it could lead to more bugs than it fixes.

[dvl]

And the great part of open source imageboard software are almost abandoned.