I\'m not asking from a business sense exactly, but for example, both reddit and

Question

I'm not asking from a business sense exactly, but for example, both reddit and Twitter are completely open source. It is my understanding that at least the large majority of their profit comes from advertising on their website. So what exactly is to prevent someone from copying their code and making their own website with some small but effective changes?

I ask this because I have a website, and I want to make money on it through advertising. I also want the code to be open source, just to be nice, but I don't want this to happen to me. My site is not (and will probably never ben close to) an institution like Twitter or reddit. I'm not sure if they're just so big they're not worried about someone copying their site, or if they actually have some protection in spite of being open source.

reddit uses CPAL, and Twitter uses the Apache license -- does this offer the protection they need or is there something else I'm not getting?

Explanation / Answer

There's no "protection" when anyone could take their codebase and put it up on another server. None. Zip. Reddit and Twitter are instead relying on the network effect to make their sites valuable. (The Wikipedia article even cites Twitter as an example of the network effect.)

The basic idea is that for a service that connects people together, its value is based primarily on the number of users. (If I'm the only person in the world with a phone, it's useless. But once everyone has one, that phone is an incredibly valuable tool.) So yes, they're "just so big they're not worried about someone copying their site," because the site itself isn't what they're about. Having a site that's that big is.

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