[freelancr]

I am considering setting up a social networking site, sigh not another one I hear you cry! Well anyway, it would be targeted at designers/developers and was considering making it opensource to perhaps improve its appeal, and to hopefully received contributions to make it better and more secure.

I was thinking of making the "live" code opensource, as I have used a script in the past to show the source of my portfolio, but that site ended up getting defaced (probably because I stupidly allowed them to see my database connection string, or it was a XSS attack)

It will be made in PHP/MySQL and AJAX, and run on apache2.

Anyway, would you? It would spend a lot of time in the alpha/private testing stages obviously before being released to the great unwashed.

[cam]

What's the point? Why would designers/developers need a social networking platform? There's already things like linkedin (with millions of registered users, and myriad identical sites) for developing business relationships, and thousands upon thousands of forums for general help and advice issues.

The two key benefits of maintaining an open source project are that it can force you to raise your game, because you're giving anyone the ability to audit your code, and because you think other people are likely to want to solve the same problem that you're in the process of solving and want to give them an opportunity not to start from scratch.

If you think either of those two benefits is worthwhile then by all means do it, but don't just do an opensource social networking platform because both those terms happen to be flavour of the month.