Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
I'm not a news reader user, at least not knowingly, but could something like this be a candidate for conversion to open source?
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As I mentioned elsewhere, Google Reader's real assets are in its backend, which while they could be open sourced, they probably wouldn't be all that useful (built on various Google-proprietary technologies, surely). Not that Google would open source it, anyway.
That said, there are open source readers like Tiny Tiny RSS and NewsBlur (both linked elsewhere in this thread). NewsBlur looks more developed, refined, and interesting, but it's also nearly impossible to install on your own right now (it has a lot of hard-coded dependencies on Amazon S3, for example, which costs money and is overkill for an instance hosting a handful of users). Maybe, hopefully, this will spur development of NewsBlur to be more easily installable. Tiny Tiny RSS looks much easier to install, but also less feature-rich.
Given the prevalence of CherryPy-based python web apps in various circles (if you're a couchpotato, you're probably aware of what they are ...), I'm somewhat surprised that nobody's whipped up a simple RSS reader using python yet. Something in between the stark simplicity of TTR and the overbuild massiveness of NewsBlur.