Idea Lab

Adrian Holovaty Talks about EveryBlock Sale to MSNBC.com

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The big news last week was that Knight-funded startup EveryBlock was bought by MSNBC.com for an undisclosed sum. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty is one of the Idea Lab bloggers, and has been a pioneering programmer/journalist at the Journal-World in Lawrence, Kan., and at the Washington Post. There had been some online scuttlebutt around the way EveryBlock released its open source code, and then was bought by MSNBC.com, so I thought it would be a good idea to go straight to the source, with a Q&A with Holovaty himself. The following interview took place over email, and included a couple questions...

• August 25, 2009
• 11 comments

EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
• 8 comments

EveryBlock Source Code Released

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "micro-local" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose. You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it'll probably make sense only if you're a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps...

• July 1, 2009
• 1 comment