Coordino - Crappy StackExchange clone (is this legal?) | Hacker News Reader

Coordino - Crappy StackExchange clone (is this legal?)

coordino.com

3 pointsNTH8 comments

There are many stackexchange clones. OSQA, shapado, coordino, and several others. The only one that can actually be installed without an infinite regress of dependencies which are no longer available (typical crappy developers who don't care about installation of their own software) is

http://www.question2answer.org/

Why it's crappy? Why you doubt it's legel? If you doubt so than maybe hacker news is also illegal because it looks like a raddit clone. (of course not)

HN and reddit are similar, but they also take different approaches. Coordino advertises itself as a "StackExchange clone" in the page <title />. It seems to be copying as many aspects of StackExchange as possible, down to the look and feel.

I called it "crappy" because it is much less polished than StackExchange. Perhaps the pejorative is unfair.

Example in the wild: http://discuss.interviewstreet.com/

I take exception to the submitter calling this crappy. What exactly is crappy about it? I definitely see the StackExchange design but I really doubt this is even close to illegal. Since when is a QA forum idea off limits as an idea? The whole idea of StackExchange by their own admission was to create a better piece of forum software. They did it but I don't think they have a patent on it or anything.

Really, this just looks a lot like StackExchange but I don't think they're really trying to hide that. I think it's great! Has anyone heard of GitLab? It's basically an open sourced GitHub. Its awesome. This is just open source StackExchange. Still awesome.

I'm also wondering why being written in PHP is important? Is PHP not cool enough anymore? Should it have been written in Scala or Haskell or with Rails or Django? CakePHP (which is what their site runs on at least) is awesome too. Boo to this title.

Being written in PHP is not important. I edited the title to remove that. I saw the page's title was:

"<title>Coordino - Home - A FREE PHP StackOverflow Clone</title>"

and just automatically included "PHP" in the HN submission without thinking terribly much about it.

A QA forum is not off limits. You are correct that they are not trying to hide that it's a SE clone. Maybe it's legal, but it feels kinda gross to me to make a shoddy knockoff of someone else's innovation.

I say it's "crappy" because it feels less responsive and lacks polish compared to the real thing. The formatting is oddly jumbled. For example, on InterviewStreet's installation (http://discuss.interviewstreet.com/), questions have some upvote count on the main page, but when you view that question directly, the upvote count is 0.

Well that's fair enough. I didn't really mean to go off on you or anything but I just felt like there was this pattern I notice around here sometimes. And I'm speaking generally here so what I'm about to say ismt directed at any one person, it's really for all of us including me because I've been very guilty of it sometimes too.

Sometimes I'll see someone talk about some open source project and call it shitty and tear it apart needlessly. We all need to remember that not every project starts out great. The creators put a lot of time and energy into giving us something that we could all use and even expand on for free. It might not be the greatest piece of software but bugs can be fixed and we should appreciate that someone gave us a head start on making something amazing from it.

Not every open source clone is bad. Clone != unethical or shitty. Sometimes it does but not always. I know for a fact that there are a ton of people looking for a self hosted StackOverflow style forum out there and I'm glad someone made it and open sourced it.

It's one thing if the creator is out promoting the thing like its great but really isn't but I don't think it's fair to come across something like this and call it crappy and I've seen it a bunch. Maybe we can do better, maybe not. If we can then we should go ahead and do it instead of tearing down others.

There's a running trend of hackers having to be the smartest person in the room all the time and that's just silly. I much prefer being the dumbest guy in the room, climbing the ranks to be the smartest, then switching to another room where I'm the dumbest again. That's how you grow as a person and a developer.

And one more interesting thing I see is this: a person will go off on how all software should be open source and piracy is okay because of x, y, and z but then turn around and attack an open source clone of something. How does that make sense?

And we all do it whether we admit it or not. Before we do it again let's use our judgement and really think about whether it's appropriate in the situation. Put yourself in the other person's shoes and then speak.

Being written in PHP is important, since it's the only language available on over 9000 cheap hosting companies.

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