Again, I love Diego's stuff but Ning's lock-in will make it unsuccessful

Submitted by Roland on Sun, 2006-01-22 13:28

+1 on learning from WordPress. I think a big part of WordPress's success (beside the fact that it's an excellent blogging system) is that it's open-source. Open Source Ning and I think the success will be much greater. Imagine if you could only run .NET apps on Microsoft servers? Nobody would develop .Net apps. It's the same with Ning, either make it open source or let people run it on their servers and the apps will come. Until this happens the current Ning lock-in means nobody will develop apps for it.

From The Thing With Ning - Why Ning Should Be More Like Wordpress.:

QUOTE

So what happens if you apply the Wordpress model to all web applications? You could create a piece of social software, then allow others to write plugins for it. Further down the line, create a hosted solution for those who can't code and let them assemble an app from the various modules. Of course, many bloggers create Wordpress plugins to scratch their own itch, so maybe social software wouldn't fly in the same way. But I still get the sense that Ning could have benefited from the radical decentralization that open source software provides. Instead, they%u2019ve built themselves a walled-garden for web applications - and walled gardens inevitably get torn down.

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Comments

Brian McCallister (not verified)

Sat, 2006-02-18 20:00

Er, everything on ning except our particular implementations of services is open source (creative-commons attribution).

All the api helpers, all the php, the language, the systems it runs on. Furthermore we strongly encourage all the data to be creative commons licensed. We allow you to fetch any of it (well, except things people explicitely say are private) from any app, and provide RSS and Atom feeds of the data, making it trivial to export (as open source as data gets).

What are you asking us to open source? It's open source software being hosted as free beer (if you can tell me how to open source a server farm, I'd love to hear it).

=)

Roland

Sat, 2006-02-18 20:45

In other words like Drupal, Ruby on Rails, etc., can I run my Ning app on my own server? I just re-checked the Ning FAQ and the website and no where do I see a link to download Ning so I can install it on my own server. It still seems like that 90% of Ning is open source except the crucial 10% you need to actually run an app which  locks any apps you develop to run on Ning only.

I'd love to be proven wrong! 

Anonymous (not verified)

Fri, 2009-08-28 20:16

where can i download this 'opensource' ning?

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