A popular social news site and an early Digg competitor, Reddit, has gone open-source today. They announced a day before that they have an announcement to make tomorrow, and the invite page had an image of a penguin which meant that the announcement was something related to to Linux or open source. The next day they released their own code to the public and now you can also build a site like Reddit.

Since reddit’s beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open. Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn’t freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we’re finally giving back to the community that has given us so much.

A new site code.reddit.com has been set up for everyone to download the source code and there you will find everything that you need to get started. Reddit want users to help them improve the site and contribute more to the community. It is licensed under Common Public Attribution License. Just for your information, Reddit’s code is in Python.