Why laracasts.com is not open source?

Lots of businesses aren't open source. Just because it's a site about code doesn't mean it should be open source! I also understand that @JeffreyWay likes to experiment with things on Laracasts, which he may not want open sourced at the time.

I haven't used Railscasts ever... But Laracasts (as a site) looks way nicer than Railscasts and I'm sure Jeff wouldn't want people standing up Laracast clones everywhere.

People love PHP since it's so easy to grab and use for their own site.

If you check the info in the about page on RailsCasts, it states this

This Site

An older version of this site is available in open source. It is intended to be used as an example Rails app, so feel free to copy bits of it for your own project. If you would like to use it as a starting point for your own site please contact me.

Last commit is over two years ago https://github.com/ryanb/railscasts they say the following (which will be the same for other parts on Laracasts)

MPORTANT: This source code is out of date with the latest changes at railscasts.com to ensure the security of the payment processing. I hope to open-source the latest additions at some point.

I'm not sure if the reason has much to do with competition. If Jeffrey open sourced this, I'm sure the code base isn't in any sort of state to allow anyone to just create a clone overnight.

My guess is that there's lots of experimental stuff and it's not worth the hassle of maintaining. Im sure there's an army of people that would be willing to publicly crucify @JeffreyWay for every violation of SRP.

Having said that, I would personally love to see the source for Laracasts.

/me sits patiently until @JeffreyWay open sources Laracasts so I can publicly crucify him for every violation of SRP.

loling at the SRP thing

Between the open sourcing of the site code and making the videos free I thinks my idea for www.thebestlaraveltraining.com is going to fly!

And don't ask, there'll be no freebies ya cheap SOBs!

If it was open sourced we could have a competition to find the deepest level of indentation in his code.

I'm sure Laracasts has plenty of videos that are actually derived from @JeffreyWay's work on the site itself. He open sources plenty of code at https://github.com/laracasts/

I don't expect him to open source the site itself. It is his bread and butter, it pays his bills. He would have to be INSANE to give it up just like that.

Whether or not Jeffrey open sources the forums, I'd love to see him do a series on how to create it from scratch (similar to the old Larabook series). I'm sure we can learn a lot by seeing his source as it is now, but I learn so much better by hearing his thought process on why he decided to use one method or pattern over another, etc.

Hopefully something like this is in the works!

Trying to put myself in his shoes, some of the reasons why I will hesitate making it open source Laracasts if I'm him are:

• Security. What if his source code happen to have some area that could be exploited? Even the security experts at Hacking Team could get themselves hacked. And sure the community can see the source code, spot it and notify him (like in reddit case) but how fast would that be before someone exploited it?

• As a tutor, the code quality of the packages he releases need to be high to retain credibility, but sometimes we know in business, that is not always possible. He needs to put on his best front for the code he releases.

Having said that, he once mentioned about open sourcing his forum code and I'm still waiting patiently for it. :)

as Railscasts is open source, why Laracasts is not? Are there any plans to make it open source?

It's at Jeffrey's discretion what he wants to do with his business and his code. But more importantly, what do you @AdityaGiri hope to get from it. Is it something specific, a piece of functionality that you're interested? Something you want to adopt to your own project? You can always ask specific questions here and I'm sure many will help. Open-sourcing doesn't mean copy/paste if that's what your hoping to do. You must understand the context sometimes, copy/paste culture can lead you down a certain path, and that might be a wrong path for what you're trying to do.

Again, ask if you need help there's always someone around ready to help.

@alenabdula I want to see his video player specifically. But open-sourcing Laracasts can allow user's to add more functionalities, like the forum and notification system to our website.

The only thing open-sourcing will do is increase the number of posts in the forums saying "how can I add the notification system to my site its not working plz help me jeffrey"

Laracasts is without a doubt complex, an amateur will look at it and be mind-f**ked. They will try to implement to theirs, fail, complain, in a vicious circular way.

Bad idea.

@AdityaGiri The video player is just Video.js.

The various bits Jeff posts about the way he does things is a nice alternative to open sourcing Laracasts. For example, I love the mid-senior level tips like using the Laravel action pattern, Laravel app performance and others. Design of applications, trade-offs, more on patterns, the example forum (I think it was called council or something?) was a good example, and could be updated. Excellent starting point.