License Concern

[Tywick]

Please remember to read the license.  Even if you do not, you are bound by it and may not redistribute SMF or change/remove any displayed copyrights.  We will go after people who do not follow these terms, so if you are not willing to abide by them please do not use SMF.  Remember that, currently, you are not allowed to redistribute any of the files, in part or full, released in the packages available for download.  Hopefully a slightly less restrictive license will be available by RC1.

How does this license affect those of us that wish to re-engineer SMF to work with the portal of our choice? Will the new license to be released with RC1 comply with the OSI? Will it restrict portal distributions?

[David]

Variations to the livense will come with RC1.  I cannot guarantee that it will fully comply with OSI standards however.

[Tywick]

* Tywick  Wonders if there will be any descent forum packages that will continue to fit within the OSI

by descent I mean better than phpBB of course and equivalent quality of SMF


I'm still concerned about being able to modify and redistribute SMF for use with XOOPS but more importantly Sphinx.

[Jeff Lewis]

The problem is that people start redistributing the forum and then there becomes so my flavours of the software out there. Lots of bugs and security holes are introduced and a lot of confusion occurs.

People seem to think that when they redistribute something it becomes theirs and they rename it, push it as their own and it's not very flattering to the original authors.

As for OSI standards, we won't comply with it. There are too many things that do not fit.