Even if there were 10 clones it would hardly matter. The clones (so to speak) would need active marketing and be able to be found easily. Even then the organization downloading the software would have to be able to host and manage it including taking care of security flaws as they come up, integrating it into their design and fixing any bugs as they come up.
To those who post similar sentiments to
I don’t use Stack Overflow because it has a well polished interface (although that does help), I use it because it has a large user base of intelligent people.
It’s not stack overflow that is what people want to clone - it’s the engine. There are many potential applications of this type of voted Q&A format outside just programming questions that people would like to use. Hence the point of stack exchange. This is what Jeff et al would be competing for.
Found one great mistake in the create-table SQL:
Never use varchar but nvarchar if you ever want to go international …
I don’t think you mean to say “But more often, it’s anything but: […]”. That introduction is saying essentially “the following list is never what we do”.
No… not sixty eigth weeks
six two eight weeks…
Agree that it’s not much to do with code.
SO needed to have enough critical mass of, basically, marketing to get going. The whole business model is based on sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H user generated content. Content not code.
I think it’s safe to say that unless Jeff had readership on his techblog (basic tech Readers Digest / Seinfeld stuff of ‘Why do get peanuts on airplanes’, ‘Why does my database query run slow’, ‘Stating the bloody obvious - part 2’ etc) AND he hadn’t of gotten Joel ‘formally of Microsoft, did you know that? Wrote VBA, but the company has gone downhill since’ Spolsky then it would almost certainly would have failed.
You need a focused form of niche celebrity to launch this kind of product, and Jeff and Joel were a perfect match. Tech geeks love their faux-buddy heroes, and the writing the writing bar ain’t that high.
In case that’s too much vitriol (I’m half kidding); The SO execution has been very well done, and it’s all for naught without that, so kudos where it is due.
Nothing is ever simple, especially writing good code.
I don’t particularly care for much of Benjamin’s slamming OSS, but I can’t login to comment on his blog because it won’t accept my OpenID, so I guess I will comment here.
I hear this all the time. Hell, I used to have a boss (who barely knew how to use a computer, and never wrote a line of code in his life) who used to ask (rhetorically) all the time “How hard can it be?”. If you had done it once you would know it isn’t easy. Most of the difficulty is in making it look easy.
Then developers shoot themselves in the foot by claiming they can ‘write that code in a week’ (kind like ‘I can name that song in three notes’) and then take months to write it.
Proprietary or OSS - either way, it really has nothing to do with the issue- I’ve seen as much or more crappy proprietary software than I have in the OSS world.
I’ve seen crap proprietary s/w because I am behind the scenes working on it, cleaning it up, refactoring it, writing code to replace it - whatever - because most proprietary code is never scene by the general public or even other developers - it is used/misused/abused/cussed at, by a million small businesses somewhere to run their business, but almost always behind the scenes, not opened up to public scrutiny like OSS is. But that is all beside the point.
The next time someone says “I can write that code in a weekend”, just smile and say “have at it” or “take your best shot”, and laugh all the way home. That’s what I do.
Except that when a developer clones a site like stack overflow, especially for internal use, they can simply clone to ui and the rest of the ‘spit and polish’ along with it.
Doing something like this would be far cheaper than an ongoing license at those rates. Sure people will pay those rates but that’s not to say that the exact same site couldn’t be cloned for internal use far cheaper.
That’s also not to say that tossing a pretty ui onto the above sql create a competitive product for a company to use. When they’re licensing software I somehow doubt the users of the software are going to care (or even know) if it’s a Stack Exchange codebase or not.
This bears repeating. Why do commentators here think SO couldn’t be an OSS project? I vaguely recall Jeff and Joel talking about that on a podcast at one point, and rejecting the idea. But it certainly could have gone the other way. Project leadership wouldn’t have changed, the ideas and polish would all be the same. Hell, they could open source the code RIGHT NOW, and nothing would be different.
“given enough time, open source clones will begin to approximate what we’ve created with Stack Overflow.”
Get off that horse man, who do you think you are? stating that stackoverflow might be coded in a weekend is indeed an exaggeration. But your appreciation of your own skills is hugely overestimated and as an open source supporter you should know how good open source can get “given enough time…”.
Though I would hope that given enough time you will begin to approximate what a humble and honest developer is.
‘It is trivial’ remark can only comes from an unexperienced developer.
If we are just talking of the code itself (not all the things around) when it comes to develop a professional software I would say that 70% of the effort is spent on reliability, performance and usability. These are not trivial!
- OSS is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter who wrote the code in the first place. What matters is who’s gonna maintain the code now and in the future.
I don’t see why so many assume that if you want to clone StackOverflow then you likely also want to use it in the same genre as StackOverflow.
Personally, if StackOverflow were opensourced I would port it to be tracker. I can even see a few features that might be useful for sites that aren’t like SO (like required tags and optional tags; required tags would be something like ‘select one or more from list x’ and optional would be selecting from list y or create your own).
Although, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that if StackOverflow were really open sourced, I’d bet that many people who claim they would port it (such as myself) would likely end up not doing that as most end up being all talk in OSS, since many genuinely lack the drive to actually do it.
Well … SW is trivial to code to some beginers … not having enough experience with projects … 
A lot of comments here don’t seem to make the distinction that the website Stackoverflow with its community is one thing and the software together with the hosting being sold is another.
The comment to me seems to be aimed at the fact that I have to pay a lot of money for a website that doesn’t come with a community. It is my job to build that community. Most of the pros people have been giving about stackexchange seem to hinge on the community, but I don’t see the logic behind it.
Focus on problem, stackoverflow is really a nice and sucessful project, but sucess don´t have a linear relation with good code.
So, when someone say that is easy to clone stackoverflow i really believe it´s easy, and maybe it´s trivial to do a better code than stackoverflow, what´s hard is doing a better sucess on the internet.
And i don´t think it just have to do with smooth experience… sof is still a little bit far from smooth experience.
Just tell them to go pound sand and have them write their own implementation if it is so easy.
It’s certainly success++, i.e. post-incremented. There’s a saying in Poland to the effect of: don’t split the hide while it’s still on the bear.
@Michael – I’ve never been a great fan of the PerlMonks site simply because it doesn’t have all of the polish. Navigation is often slow and searching is very slow and often doesn’t find what I want (or buries it in extraneous results), and it’s dated.
(I’m talking about just the site itself, the community that lives therein is a whole other set of pros and cons.)
The blogging, podcasts, and whatnot associated with StackOverflow are just a sideshow (I ignore all of that anyway).
I guess it’s the usual story - many things are trivial to do. Doing them well is an entirely different matter.
Nice post! I wonder if StackOverflow clones could become the next standard demo app for frameworks, like the ubiquitous blog app.