Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lkozma 5986 days ago
Great project, congratulations.

I am still curious about one aspect: why do you realease the source code? (same question for browsershots).. I think for such a service the vast majority is not interested in the backend code and those who are interested might take it and build a competing product, not being required to release the modified code. Am I missing something? What is your take on this ?

1 comments

Good question, so I wrote a blog post: http://nxdom.posterous.com/why-is-nxdom-open-source
Thanks for the answer, I agree with all your points. I'm just saying that still, there is a small technical difference from open source desktop software: technically, in this case, I can not verify that the source code you release is exactly the code that you are running on the server, just that the code reproduces all the "visible" functionality of the site. I wonder if there exists such a place for hosting trusted web-apps, where one could publish source code and they would certify that the actual code running on the server is the same.
Again, I'm not saying you should do anything differently, I'm just trying to understand if open source makes sense for pure web apps.