OSQA - Roll your own StackOverflow

This is a realy bad idea. Of course I fully suport open source and self-hosted alternatives, but there are really good reasons for using the Stackexchange system. They will not only do all the hosting and management, but they'll help you find co-admins for the site and work out if there's actually a market for your chosen topic. If there's not a market for your chosen topic then there's likely to still be places you could ask questions like Quora or one of the existing Stack Exchange sites or Metafilter.

I can see this posibly being useful in a closed enterprise evironment when you want a way of helping coworkers solve problems. Maybe. But in that situation there's probably going to be a better way.

But before doing that, consider if the community you are trying to build already exists:

- Lots here: http://area51.stackexchange.com/

- Programming, etc.: http://stackoverflow.com/

- Jobs: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/

- Server Administration: http://serverfault.com/

- Web Applications: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/

- Gaming: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/

- Ubuntu: http://askubuntu.com/

- Webmasters: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/

- Cooking: http://cooking.stackexchange.com/

- Game Development: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/

- Math: http://math.stackexchange.com/

- Photography: http://photo.stackexchange.com/

- Statistics: http://stats.stackexchange.com/

- TeX and LaTeX: http://tex.stackexchange.com/

- Computer Enthusiasts (OS, etc.): http://superuser.com/

The other two sites are just for support/feedback purposes:

- Stack Exchange API: http://stackapps.com/

- Questions about stack overflow/stack exchange itself: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/

And there are a multitude of other sites that have Q&A, the new kid on the block being Quora ( http://www.quora.com/ ).

This is just further evidence that design is hard and copying is easy. If it weren't, we would have the stackoverflow clone before the original.

Using this clone in many cases is impractical because hosting and administering the thing isn't free, and it probably will cost more to do this than to just use stackexchange.