Community:Forums - how long this will be free ?

I am surely not going to make friends with this post, but my rant of the day going to Telligent.

Community:Forums, new name for ASP:Forums is now under the control of Telligent. What surprised me is that this company 'hijacked' the product built through the contribution of many developers in the .Net community.

Of course, it's still free to download, but the confusion come by the fact that if you click on the download link, you are redirected to a store online, and one of the first thing asked is 'Want to buy these items by Paypal?'.

I had to read twice the page to find that I can still download the product for free. I wonder if soon or later this free option will not disappear ?

I think if Telligent want to make money with this tool, I have no objections. But we should have one free version at ASPNet web site and another commercial one in Telligent.

And if I have to buy their forums tool, It shouldn't be called anymore Community::Forums but surely Telligent forums.

I am very dependant in my different developments with ASPNet Forums, so please let the forums belonging to the community.

 

7 Comments

  • 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...

  • 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.

  • 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)

Comments have been disabled for this content.