I'm sorry if I came across as disparaging. I mean no disrespect to either the Fog Creek employee, Stackoverflow or anyone else. I read both Joel and Jeff's blog and I have the utmost respect for both of them and their work. Thinking it over in my head again, I should have probably thought things over before posting this part:

>>>>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.<<<

It was mostly a reaction at the huge amount of money they want to charge for a such a software. But after reading the various responses, it has helped me understand the amount of engineering, user-experience studies and hard work that has gone into this fine web app. Regardless though, I still think its overpriced.

Yep, I probably fell into the "shitz easy" trap there and I will probably fail, publicly and humiliatingly in this case =( to implement all of StackOverflow's functionality in one weekend.

EDIT: Actually, as a sign of respect to SO and their folks, I'm not going to clone SO anymore, it has just become a totally no-win proposition for me. Another reason is that the project here:

http://code.google.com/p/cnprog/

Already does a really good job of emulating SO and there's little point in me writing another one.

But, I will spend the weekend cloning another piece of highly vaunted ( and overpriced IMO ) web software which does NOT have an opensource alternative.