What does the bold text alert mean in the Website Repo

Hello!! i wanted to ask what does this mean in the website repo: This repo is treated as an internal repo. That means the source code is public, but we do not accept Pull Requests, we do not support the app being run locally, and we do not encourage people to fork or reuse this repository. what would you like to see or support in case of trying to run a parallel project? would it be better to have a different codebase? thanks in advance

Im currently trying to roll a new project based on exercism but with a small different approach, so i really want to know what does this mean, is like you can’t or more like you can but your project its just something that is out of our scope so we are going to continue on our thing, so if you have situations its your responbility , the same of having a different codebase inspired and referenced with what you have done

Thanks for you help!!

@ggwilin Hi - thanks for asking! We don’t really want people to fork Exercism’s website, but it’s allowed (as long as you open source all the changes you make in alignment with the AGPL licence).

There are three reasons we discourage it:

  1. Taking another website and tweaking it a little is probably a route for failure. So many thousands of hours of product thought have gone into Exercism to solve a very specific set of problems, that trying to just copy and paste that to solve another problem, even if it’s similar, won’t work
  2. There’s lots in the repo that’s copyright - things like the word “Exercism”, all of the graphics and imagery, etc. So there’s a load of stuff that you’ll have to change to actually be able to deploy the project legally.
  3. It’s hard to deploy. We have hundreds of AWS components and dozens of servers running, which costs thousands of pounds per month. It’s very unlikely that this is a necessarily setup for you, but it’s also going to be a lot of work to get Exercism working properly without all that.

I’d love people to be inspired by Exercism’s approach, and I don’t mind people reusing bits of the codebase that they find useful (as long as they OSS any tweaks/changes they make) but beyond that, I just think it’s a bad idea.

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