HC might soon be open source! We are reaching a consensus among programmers and
very active volunteers right now - the final decision will be made in a few
days. Now we would like to hear your thoughts: do you like the idea of HC being
open source, or do you see problems? Especially if you are a programmer, have a
legal background or have experience in open source project organization and
community management: would you like to be involved? Please send any thoughts
you have about this big step in HC's history directly to Veit.

What do you mean with HC being Open Source?? It is not clear for me because,
what I can immediately think of is, you gonna release source code for everyone
to make his own hospitality interchange community and that pretty much makes no
sense.
So, could you explain a li'l bit more what do you plan to do?

Cheers,
M.

I also wonder what you mean! What is open source?

1) OpenSource!= Cloning. 
We need OpenSource development model to involve new volunteers into development
process. As i posted before - i don`t think that money is a problem. 
Some days ago i read an article about data loss on CS. On every 2nd line i heard
"we pay $$$ to super professionals", etc. And in the end of story i see that
they had no backup, or even restore strategy ;-) I think that main problem there
was lack of expertise.
Situation with the HC is like that - as you see, i did many actions to speedup
the site, but we still have a bottlenecks, which are not very hard to fix, but
this require time and knowledge. So, i hope there, that community members with
strong php/mysql skills will become a volunteers :) So if someone will decide to
clone us - we cannot stop this, but he will have only source code, without
database and strong community.

2) OpenSource will make our site more secure. Yes, code will allow hackers to
find a holes, but also it will allow our team to discuss some security moments
with other developers, use external audit tools, accept side patches from other
members, etc.

3) Only source code will be opened. Database and even encoding algorithms will
not be showed to anyone, so don`t worry there. Your private data will not leak
to anyone.

If you still have questions or would like to join the project - feel free to
write there.

I have been the Tech Team Coordinator for CouchSurfing. I stopped volunteering
for CS in May, mainly because of a "final draft" of a Non-Disclosure Agreement
that contained a "zombie" and a "slave" clause - i.e. CS will own everything you
type, sketch or even think and you're not supposed to volunteer or work for a
similar organization.

So I'm excited about this announcement and I am willing to help and to assist.
Add me to your list if you set up an email list.

A remark: You don't have to worry about (serious) clone sites using the HC code
base. If someone wants to set up a clone site they're (probably) much better off
starting from scratch with clean code.

Yuuuuhuuuuuuu!!!! 

It would be a great news.



Please make this happen 


Greetings

José

Being an OpenSource proponent and having provided solutions to my customers on
OpenSource applications, I warmly welcome this decision. I completely agree that
open source would only strengthen the site, biringing in faster changes and
would suite well the HC concept .