Creating a Reddit/Digg/Hacker News clone

Question

I am looking to launch a site like Reddit/Digg/Hacker News internally in my company that lets people submit links, vote on them, and discuss them. The feature set doesn't need to be any more complex than Hacker News. I am looking for an existing platform that can do this and satisfies the following requirements:

1. If it's open source, it should be in a permissive license (e.g. BSD)
2. Runs on Windows Server (we are a Microsoft shop)
3. Simple to deploy/maintain

Does such a tool exist? Reddit is open source, but licensed under the viral CPAL. News.arc, which powers Hacker News, seems to have a more appropriate license (Perl Artistic License), but it is written in the arcane Arc language, which calls into question points 2 and 3.

Answer 1

Just use Reddit if their source is what would work for your needs. Ignore the license, nobody's going to come after some internal thing, and I doubt they would even if it was public. Licenses are ridiculously overrated, half the proprietary software out there are rip-offs of earlier open source projects.

The hacker news site looks pretty simple to make. You could outsource to some India web dev company and get a clone of it built in PHP for like $30, no joke

Haha I like how I get downvoted for speaking the truth =\

Answer 2

You should check out Pligg (pligg.com). It says its an "Open Source Content Management" system, but in reality it is an open source version of digg. They copied the digg design and made an open source version so other people (like you) could make their own digg sites. Its PHP and Mysql and its simple to use and admin. The license is GPLish (Affero) and if you want you can read more about the Affero license here. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Three things come to mind: Slashcode (which powers slashdot), Metaphilter (which runs MonkeyFilter, a MetaFilter clone) and Scoop (which runs Kuro5hin).

Slashcode does not claim to work on Windows, and I'm unable to find the documentation for the others.

As for licensing, as far as I know, they're all under FOSS licenses.

Hopefully this should serve as a starting point.

Note: The site for Scoop seems to have no content right now.

Answer 4

Just use Hotaru CMS. An open source, PHP platform for building your own websites. With flexible plugins and themes, you can make any site you like. The most common use for Hotaru is social bookmarking. They have all the plugins you need to make your own Digg-style community.