I think that it is quite distasteful to blatantly clone StackOverflow's functionality and design, right down to the "New here?" banner. This sort of behavior is no way to start a community.
The site is running off of OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/). Your comment is a bit like complaining that someone running the default theme of a Wordpress blog is "cloning" other blogs.
No, my comment is a bit like complaining that Wordpress' default theme is a clone of the default Blogger theme.
I had not heard of OSQA. I'm about to apologize to the person who started this particular site (other thread), as it's not his fault. But being open source doesn't make it OK to copy someone else's hard work.
I recently launched an OSQA (the Django+Python software running my site) for ML+NLP: http://metaoptimize.com/qa/
That last site was incredibly successful. I have a few hundred signups, there is activity on the site every ten minutes or so, and everyone on the site is very grateful. I'll post some quotes at the end of my comment.
I decided to try this again with another niche topic that I find very important: scalability. There is a lot of undocumented folk wisdom, as well as little known tips and tricks, that I believe should be discussed in a Q+A format with voting.
I am sorry you consider my site distateful. I took the default OSQA skin and made some small customizations.
I hope in reading the following comments about the ML+NLP site, you'll see that people genuinely value what I put up. I am hoping similarly to create value on another topic that a lot of people wrestle with daily.
Things people are saying about MetaOptimize Q+A:
Alexandre Passos (Unicamp): "Really thank you for that. As a machine
learning phd student from somewhere far from most good research
centers (I'm in brazil, and how many brazillian ML papers have you
seen in NIPS/ICML recently?), I struggle a lot with this folk wisdom.
Most professors around here haven't really interacted enough with the
international ML community to be up to date"
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476247)
Philip Resnick (UMD): "Looking at the questions being asked, the
people responding, and the quality of the discussion, I can already
see this becoming the go-to place for those 'under the hood' details
you rarely see in the textbooks or conference papers. This site is
going to save a lot of people an awful lot of time and frustration."
Aria Haghighi (Berkeley): "Both NLP and ML have a lot of folk wisdom
about what works and what doesn't. A site like this is crucial for
facilitating the sharing and validation of this collective knowledge."
Ryan McDonald (Google): "A tool like this will help disseminate and
archive the tricks and best practices that are common in NLP/ML, but
are rarely written about at length in papers."
esoom on Reddit: "This is awesome. I'm really impressed by the quality
of some of the answers, too. Within five minutes of skimming the site,
I learned a neat trick that isn't widely discussed in the literature."
(http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ckw5k/stack...)
Assuming you are not the proprietor of OSQA: I apologize for implying that you acted distastefully. I was not aware of the existence of OSQA, which is what I find distasteful.
Digging deeper, I can see that OSQA is based on the same tech as CNProg, which has been discussed on HN before. If I recall correctly, most people shared my displeasure with the clone. But now because OSQA is open sourced, people think it is OK?
When people spend a lot of time and money to design something through blood, sweat, and tears, like I'm sure the StackOverflow team did, it is not cool for someone else to come by and just clone it blindly. This also applies to free and open source software. Derivative, inspired work is one thing. But this is a step away from copy-paste.
In fact, it is cool, it is expected, it is flattering, and it is perfectly ethical. I'm guessing the StackOverflow team feels this way too.
There is so much more to software than what your CSS layout is, and we should all look to our fellow designers and programmers and steal the best ideas and use them ourselves. That's how software evolves.
From a legal standpoint, didn't we settle the whole look and feel issue way back when with Apple vs. MS?
A lot of open source software has started by blatantly copying the design or concepts of a commercial product, but then they have later diverged from the original source of inspiration to have a few original ideas of their own. A couple of examples: OpenOffice, RhythmBox, Freeciv.
