Mybb community, very immature.

[frostschutz]

(06-08-2010 09:55 AM)Harry Wrote:  I think MYBB needs to be forked.

If anyone wants to fork MyBB, after the MyBB 1.6 LGPL release would be a good time.

Forking GPL projects is usually unattractive because the original authors can just say "thank you", take the best of the fork and integrate it back into their original project. And any smart authors would do just that. In practice this means a GPL fork can't get a leg up on the GPL project because any real improvements you make to the fork, will also be in the original project. Giving users no incentive to switch.

If MyBB 1.6 is licensed LGPL however the story is different. It would mean that the original project is LGPL, whereas the fork can be GPL.

This means any improvements or fixes made to the original project, can be taken into the fork (since nothing prevents LGPL => GPL). So any improvements the original project makes, your fork has them too. At the same time, any improvents you make in your fork, can't be taken back into the original project, since it doesn't work in the other direction (GPL => LGPL) - you can't just take GPL code and declare it to be Lesser GPL.

GPL is often referred to as a virulent license and it's true, since even the LGPL is, in a way, still GPL, in that it does not stop you to go back to GPL at all.  It wouldn't work like that for BSD or MIT.

MyBB in general is the ideal fork candidate; most of its developers are incapable and the project itself is already declared dead, as the current codebase will be abandoned  in favour of a complete rewrite. No other project rejects so many simple to implement improvements in favour of a vaporware that may never be released.

That said, I don't see anyone in the MyBB community who would actually be able to fork this project. If there's one more requirement to make a fork succeed, it's that you need capable developers on the team that's doing the fork, and within the MyBB community, there quite simply aren't any. If you decide to do it, it may be a good experience for you personally, but I highly doubt you'd be getting anywhere with it.