Community:Forums some clarification

My previous post/rant about Community:Forums got the expected reaction, and I entered in an intense and very interesting debate on IM with Rob Howard, one of Telligent founders.

Thanks Rob for the chat, even if we are still in disagreement on some points. I still think, and I am not the only one, that you can't snap your fingers and decide to take an important piece of community development like the forums, and make profit with this, whatever the good and valid excuses you gave me.

From Rob:

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.

I also fully agree with Scott Galloway when he say:

"... 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... "

Jeff has also developed a free forums tool called Popforums and I will have a look at it for my next project. Because not only is free but it has been cleverly developed on a more simple basis than Community:Forums which could be a bit 'heavy weight' for some small projects.

I like competition :-)

11 Comments

  • Telligent is allowed to make money. Why should software be free? What's wrong with making money? The economic system designed by Lenen and Marx didn't seem to work very well..........

  • I don't think it's a matter of being offended by capitalism like some of the open-source nuts are. I think it's the idea that people were openly contributing to it, and now someone is going to sell it.



    My forum is not strictly open source, as I retain the copyright in my license and require money if you want to use it without the copyright notice. That's probably a fair trade considering it's one guy's product.



    I've always felt that forum was needlessly complex and difficult to modify. And for something that's supposed to be representative of a &quot;best practice&quot; of sorts, it leaves a lot to be desired. I have enormous respect for Rob Howard, I really do, but I think complexity without clear pay-off is bad.

  • I don't think it's a matter of being offended by capitalism like some of the open-source nuts are. I think it's the idea that people were openly contributing to it, and now someone is going to sell it.



    My forum is not strictly open source, as I retain the copyright in my license and require money if you want to use it without the copyright notice. That's probably a fair trade considering it's one guy's product.



    I've always felt that forum was needlessly complex and difficult to modify. And for something that's supposed to be representative of a &quot;best practice&quot; of sorts, it leaves a lot to be desired. I have enormous respect for Rob Howard, I really do, but I think complexity without clear pay-off is bad.

  • Sorry about the double post... (speaking of complex software that doesn't work half the time)

  • Speaking to Rob about this, I feel I personally misjudged their motives and should respond to my own comment. I think much of the problem we as Microsoft technology focussed developers have is that there just isn't a strong open source / community movement such as exists in the Java / Linux world. I think there's various reasons for this - much of it to do with perception / backgroups (e.g., ASP wasn't as hard to learn as say, PERL - many open source efforts derive out of 'learning' projects...). Another factor in this is the historically fairly weak MS communities - which are now on the rise - to develop and continue open source projects you often need help and support - something which communities provide... If Telligent can provide some impetus in driving forward these 3 projects and provide guidance as to the general implementation and direction of them then that's great and we should as a commuity support that effort - I know I intend to. Oh, and support doesn't mean using a product then bitching about it - we can all write code...if ypou have a problem with open source products, the idea is to fix the problem and submit it for everyone else to use. I've participated in some Java open source projects in the past and I have to say, it's a huge amount of fun and well as being a great learning tool!

  • &gt; DOES Telligent have the copyright of the code

    &gt; of asp.net forums



    Excellent point! Yes, this is something we have taken care of.

  • This is a little bit of a paper-tiger...



    Andrew's point is accurate:

    &gt; consensus of perception



    We have a free version that comes with all the source code. There are 2 differences between the free version and the commercial version:

    1. The commercial version comes with 30 days of support

    2. The commercial version doesn't require the display of a 'powered by' logo at the bottom of every page.



    The commercial version costs $129 (U.S.). We have retained, acquired, or have been granted all rights to the code.



    We're not back to true OSS yet. We're trying to get there, but frankly there is a lot of organizational work to be done on our end to make that work again.



    If you want to talk about hijacking, talk about Lucene (who we were considering using). We are not doing that -- we include ALL of the source in all versions.



    We're trying to find the balance between paying bills and taking these applications to the next level -- somehow that seems to be getting lost in all of this :(

  • Frans commented: &quot;If it doesn't have a license, it means NOTHING is allowed, not even redistribution.&quot; I used to think the opposite but since he's a comercial software author he should know about this legal/copyright stuff. Maybe Rob can help with this subject and tell us if the Forums source is under a License. then we can can go on with the discussion of what could be done with the source code.

  • &gt; tell us if the Forums source is under a License

    Yes. Originally it was the Microsoft Starter Kit license, now it is under a nearly identical license for the free version and a separate commercial license for the commercial version.

  • &gt; tell us if the Forums source is under a License

    Yes. Originally it was the Microsoft Starter Kit license, now it is under a nearly identical license for the free version and a separate commercial license for the commercial version.

  • I have to agree with Jeff on the complexity of setting up .Text, which I assume is the same for the CS:Blogs...



    And the asp.net forums for the most part employed an interesting way to do things, but it always felt like a hack to me.



    I dont really wanna attack anybody on the issue of making money, I believe if you like the software, you should at least contribute a little for the continued developement of it... I consider it to be a project that I dont have to bug-fix, and when a newer release is made, I try to install it.



    Sure, there were a few problems, but hey, even Microsoft Office had some problems...

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