help.net

I find the whole arrangement to be very weird as well. Not sure what to make of it.

I'm about half-way through a POP Forums rewrite (http://www.popforums.com) targeting ASP.NET v2. So far so good, and the feature set is finally getting where it should be. The existing version isn't bad, and it's a hell of a lot easier to alter. Going to get out a point release soon because we can't all wait for Whidbey.

My forum is, and will continue to be free.

Well, you could really say that about any software that isn't explicitly licensed under a recongnised open-source license. Look at Lucene.NET for example, that seemed to go commercial the instant anyone started using it...The Telligent Systems site does make a big thing of being 'Open Source' - though of course this pretty much means 'Shared Source' at present (Community Server:Blogs is now not accessible by CVS for example and I've not seen anywhere which mentions how to join this project)... Looking at the present license there seems nothing to stop you taking the source and making your own version (the 'must display the logo' stuff would, I doubt, be legally binding in any way). The saddest thing is that this again reinforces the Java / Open Source world's view of the .NET community - that as soon as anything seems vaguely profitable then 'community be damned' and profit takes over...

We're actually in the process of getting back to Open Source, i.e. allowing external contributions. We've spent the past 4 months with external check-in closed only because we've tried to keep the team small and focused. The plan is to move to a model of a few people that have check-in rights -- we're in the process now of working with those individuals -- similar to how many other large OSS projects are run.

Scott's comment about profitability is not completely accurate in this case. There is both a free version and a commercial version available. The commercial version is $129 and includes forums, blogs, and a photo gallery. Given that we have 6 fulltime people (who we pay) working on the project we would have to sell a lot of the $129 commercial licenses to make a profit and that's just not happening nor did we expect it to.

We actually decided to pursue this route of product licensing based on how we saw the ABM (anything but Microsoft) crowd moving. MySql, PHP Nuke, and many Linux distros have moved to a similar model - whereas there is a time/money continium and they offer both a free and a commercial version of their products.

We will always have a free version available.

However, for people that choose to use the applications commercially we do hope they choose to purchase a commercial license. This helps us develop, maintain, and continue building these solutions.

Our proof of this effort cannot be demonstrated overnight and the skepticism with our intensions is completely fair; we can't prove them otherwise until we have more history to hold up as evidence.

If you want to learn more about what we're doing -- the best place is http://www.communityserver.org. We've done several postings there that discuss our long term plans and goals for these projects.

As for our Whidbey plans, as many people know I used the Forums as my testbed for coming up with Whidbey features such as Membership, Roles, Personalization, Skins, Providers, and many other core ASP.NET 2.0 features. Needless to say, Community Server will have Whidbey capabilities and integration second-to-none <g>. In fact, in our 1.0 release of Community Server we will have a back-ported Membership, Roles, and Personalization system that is forward compatible with Whidbey.

If anyone wants to chat about any of this offline with me, just drop me a note at rhoward@telligentsystems.com.

What you may not understand Paschal, is that the Forms have been Rob's pet project since Microsoft acquired the code from Scott Mitchell. In fact, I still have the zip file of the first version of the ASP.NET Forums, before Rob took the project over. Rob's the one that has put the most work into it (Besides Terry Denham), and Rob should be allowed to do whatever he wants with it.

The reason that it's called Community:Forums is because right now the Forums are a subset of the planned CommunityServer 1.0, which have all the different open source projects integrated.

I don't agree with you at all. Could not anyone just pick up the source and do exactly what Telligent is doing? Yes. If I took an open source app and modified it to fit my needs AND made it better, I think I would want to turn a profit in doing so. I am not an opponent to open source but neither am I for it. I think open source is good in many ways but even open source will bog down if nothing is driving them. Telligent will make major modifications for the GOOD of the app and then open source will try to keep up. I don't personally know anyone from Telligent or what is in their business plan but what they are doing is good for everyone.

I don't agree with you at all. Could not anyone just pick up the source and do exactly what Telligent is doing? Yes. If I took an open source app and modified it to fit my needs AND made it better, I think I would want to turn a profit in doing so. I am not an opponent to open source but neither am I for it. I think open source is good in many ways but even open source will bog down if nothing is driving them. Telligent will make major modifications for the GOOD of the app and then open source will try to keep up. I don't personally know anyone from Telligent or what is in their business plan but what they are doing is good for everyone.

Paschal, Alex and others (see comments in their posts) are questioning Telligent decision to sell Community:Forums as a comercial product.

I would like to take Telligent side in this discusion.

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/dotnetrolando/archive/2004/09/29/27133.aspx

It's only 'hijacking' if they use code which is copyrighted by others and they don't have a resellers contract with the copyright holders. So if everyone has released their code as BSD licensed or not licensed at all but simply handed it to Howard with the words "do with it what you want", it's not hijacking.

I'm not sure if that's the case. If NOT (i.e.: if there is code written by some people in the current code base and they have NOT handed over the copyright to Howard or have given them permission to do whatever they like with it), Telligent has a problem which will sooner or later will become mean and ugly.

So it depends on what the situation is about the code contributed by others. Telligent can't rightfully resell code written by others who didn't give permission to Telligent to make money over their work. As said: it's up to the lawyers what the exact situation is.

It has nothing to do with 'open source' or the hype around it, but with plain old copyright law 101.

It's only 'hijacking' if they use code which is copyrighted by others and they don't have a resellers contract with the copyright holders. So if everyone has released their code as BSD licensed or not licensed at all but simply handed it to Howard with the words "do with it what you want", it's not hijacking.

I'm not sure if that's the case. If NOT (i.e.: if there is code written by some people in the current code base and they have NOT handed over the copyright to Howard or have given them permission to do whatever they like with it), Telligent has a problem which will sooner or later will become mean and ugly.

So it depends on what the situation is about the code contributed by others. Telligent can't rightfully resell code written by others who didn't give permission to Telligent to make money over their work. As said: it's up to the lawyers what the exact situation is.

It has nothing to do with 'open source' or the hype around it, but with plain old copyright law 101.

It strikes me that the DNN situation is not dissimilar either - the codebase is built by a closed group - many aspects of code are taken from other sources - copyright is "taken" by the project founder and others are noted as contributors (if they are lucky)