PunBB comment on FluxBB announcement (Page 2 of 2)

I don't see why. Flux's code is GPL and public.

And more, for now, I think it's exactly their plans. Why invest in developers, to write something other people are going to do for free? Of course, while they may have entered a competition with Flux and, if done right, won, this means PunBB is going to die. There's no reason to keep up with it under those circumstances.

Better for us, it means more users, more user base, a bigger community.

All extensions will be tested before we host them.

@Jérémie: My quote is misleading, the "this" I was referring to is Pun & Flux codebases becoming different. Which will happen unless Pun just copies Flux, which I don't think they will do long term. The tone of the Flux developers (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that they aren't keen on taking development direction from Pun's owners, or core code written by their developers.

For now Pun's plan is to clearly copy Flux, wasn't that what I said? That's what I was trying to say. But I only think it's their short-term plan. If their long term strategy is to just mooch the code off of Flux then, as hcgtv said in the Pun forum:

The reason I don't see them doing that long term is because if they do then their money was wasted. Why would they buy the Pun "brand" just to kill it? If they just wanted to be an extensions factory they could have built extensions for Pun without buying it in the first place, saving themselves money and everyone else a lot of stress.

My point being: there has been a lot of polite talk from Anatoly, but the actions of "the owners" has contradicted that talk from the outset. I think that their talk will begin to match those actions once 1.3 is out and they don't need the Flux developers or community anymore. All this talk of "sharing" and "interoperability" will fade and they will begin to up sell Pun as better then Flux using their extensions as the cornerstone of that argument. From the tone of his posts it's almost as if Anatoly views Pun as Red Hat and Flux as Fedora, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the type of marketing angle they take. At least that's my completely unqualified opinion on the matter.

@Felix: At the risk of sounding like I'm defending them...Microsoft does offer a lot of services with their software, and not all of them cost you money to use. All software comes with bugs, regardless of how well it's tested, and no software comes with a warranty whether you pay for the license to use it or not. When you "buy" commercial software you're paying for the privilege to use it, not for a guarantee that it will work. Development is not the same as Support and typically your license fee is only covering Development costs.

Last edited by chris (2008-05-17 16:01:47)

And no general public software (and something like PunBB falls into that category here) comes a warranty.

A warranty is money. A serious talk to the developer is a joke, they don't care. The only thing that matter is money: what constitute a downtime? What constitute a data loss? How much am I getting paid for those?

PunBB is a recognised name.

Last edited by MattF (2008-05-17 21:51:03)

yes and we must now say Welcome to fluxbb

Do you hope that FluxBB and PunBB are lose-lose?

I hope so, when you think of the time and effort everybody, especially Rickard, put into PunBB I would hope it thrives. The important thing is the projects become distinct sooner rather than later.

It quite took some while until I realized that all FluxBB devs have changed their avatar on the punbb forum to forks.. Really funny

That is F***ing AWESOME!