I wrote this to Deger before—I think that open sourcing Metaculus won’t be beneficial in some ways that users might expect, but it still seems like a positive thing. Basically, I’d expect the codebase to be a monolith that is practically difficult for others to deploy or reuse. All of our work at QURI is open-source, but I don’t know of anyone who’s actually forked our main web app (Guesstimate, Metaforecast, Squiggle Hub) code bases and run it themselves.
A long-term improvement to aim for is to componentize things. Perhaps there are a few key parts, like the distribution plotting, that could be used easily by other platforms.
But overall, I think this is a positive and respectable move. I think the new leadership should get kudos for this. If nothing else, it seems like a good sign of a more open and cooperative position.
I fixed my writing above—I meant to refer to our web apps, like Guesstimate/Metaforecast/Squiggle Hub.
I think that smaller libraries like Squiggle itself make more sense to both open-source and try to document and the like!
Similarly, I think Metaculus is likely too big for many people to get use of as a whole (in terms of the code base), but there are certain subparts that might be used. I’d naively expect these subparts to not be isolated/packaged well, unless extra work is done to open-source them specifically.
Congrats! I’m pretty happy with this.
I wrote this to Deger before—I think that open sourcing Metaculus won’t be beneficial in some ways that users might expect, but it still seems like a positive thing. Basically, I’d expect the codebase to be a monolith that is practically difficult for others to deploy or reuse. All of our work at QURI is open-source, but I don’t know of anyone who’s actually forked our main web app (Guesstimate, Metaforecast, Squiggle Hub) code bases and run it themselves.
A long-term improvement to aim for is to componentize things. Perhaps there are a few key parts, like the distribution plotting, that could be used easily by other platforms.
But overall, I think this is a positive and respectable move. I think the new leadership should get kudos for this. If nothing else, it seems like a good sign of a more open and cooperative position.
Having QURI’s code in open source forms explicitly helped me improve Squiggle’s Observable integration & then develop my own smaller subset of Squiggle, so even though I didn’t fork & deploy your code it was super helpful for debugging & adapting!
Good to know, thanks!
I fixed my writing above—I meant to refer to our web apps, like Guesstimate/Metaforecast/Squiggle Hub.
I think that smaller libraries like Squiggle itself make more sense to both open-source and try to document and the like!
Similarly, I think Metaculus is likely too big for many people to get use of as a whole (in terms of the code base), but there are certain subparts that might be used. I’d naively expect these subparts to not be isolated/packaged well, unless extra work is done to open-source them specifically.