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pixfabrik / fathom

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Host it on GitHub #7

Open russplaysguitar opened 13 years ago

russplaysguitar commented 13 years ago

Why not?

iangilman commented 13 years ago

I'm not planning on open-sourcing the website itself, so it doesn't make sense for me to host its code on github. I would be delighted to open-source some of the technology that makes it possible, however, and I'll certainly use github for that. The first of these, small as it is, is my code for building Grooveshark requests:

https://github.com/pixfabrik/grooveshark_py

russplaysguitar commented 13 years ago

Isn't most (or all) of the website in Javascript anyways? So it's already available to the public...

iangilman commented 13 years ago

Being able to view source is one thing (and the server-side code is not insignificant); one-click fork is another.

I'd love for Fathom to inspire other devs, and I'd be happy to share the techniques I used, but I don't want clones of it popping up.

russplaysguitar commented 13 years ago

Well, I can tell you that I, for one, would be happy to fork it, improve it, and send you a pull request-- all without hosting it myself. But being limited to filling out bug forms really puts a damper on my excitement for contributing to it.

I think you should make a development API for the server, post the client-side code on GitHub, and tightly control the # of API requests so that no one can simply use the API to host their own Fathom version. This is similar to what a lot of other sites do, but you could bring open source developers in to develop for the core site itself (in addition to other API-based development.)

Or, you can think of it from a business perspective: If you have developers sign up to get access to the API, you'd be able to force them to sign an agreement saying they won't copy your site.

Seems like a win-win to me.

iangilman commented 13 years ago

Definitely an interesting idea! I'll have to figure out how I want to make it work, legally and technically, but I like it.

russplaysguitar commented 13 years ago

Cool, well as soon as it is ready, I'd love to work on it.