How to screw up an Open Source project

hcgtv · 2009-05-07 12:26:34

Hey,

Is it still politically incorrect to talk about PunBB?

Can we state our opinions as to what they did wrong?

Like changing the domain name, their lack of forum presence at first, PunBB.net, etc.

Smartys · 2009-05-07 16:09:11

Hmm, I think it's OK to talk about as long as this doesn't devolve into flaming or ad hominem attacks on PunBB. But I'm sure one of the FluxBB team members will weigh in if they feel the topic is inappropriate.

Personally, while I think that Informer has made some mistakes, the original mistake was making the agreement in the first place. If you want to talk about screwing up an open source project, I think that's the place to start: unnecessary commercialization.

Edit:

Also, I think it's fair game to talk about the mistakes made here as well. FluxBB has certainly not been a perfect project and that has made a lot of what has gone on at PunBB worse.

Now, as for what you brought up:

Changing the domain name was purely a business decision. While it made some sense from a business perspective, it made no sense from the perspective of the community (which is one reason why we forked).

Their lack of forum presence was regrettable, as was the lack of a capable developer presence. Anatoly was good at what he did but Informer just did not provide the support staff to work on the project. They still aren't, or at least they don't have someone directing their efforts very well.

PunBB.NET is just ridiculous. I've held my tongue about it since it was released, but it was an extremely silly move. The software itself is full of security holes (it looks like it was coded by two people, only one of whom had heard about SQL injections) and is unfinished: branding it with the PunBB name does nothing but bring down the rest of the project.

Last edited by Smartys (2009-05-07 16:15:56)

Franz · 2009-05-07 16:18:54

But watch out: they're reading this forum... (see below)

http://fluxbb.org/forums/forum/8/bug-reports-13/
http://punbb.informer.com/trac/changeset/1155

Smartys · 2009-05-07 18:16:29

Actually, it's the other way around: someone reported it there and I realized it was also applicable here.
Even if they do have people who read it, why is that bad? It would be nice to hear from another perspective that seems underrepresented, especially without Anatoly.

Franz · 2009-05-07 19:47:32

I didn't say it's bad. Even better if they noticed themselves

hcgtv · 2009-05-08 00:49:20

Smartys wrote:

Hmm, I think it's OK to talk about as long as this doesn't devolve into flaming or ad hominem attacks on PunBB.

I wouldn't want the thread to sour, cause it would defeat it's purpose. Talking about what went wrong, in an honest and open fashion, would help both projects. Open Source and the Net are in their infancy, so we shouldn't give up and throw in the towel just yet to the phpBBs or vBulletins of the world.

My hope is that PunBB has realized that it's the community that matters, more so than the code. Yes, they purchased the rights to the project but then went about alienating most everyone. FluxBB garnered the community but ended up getting tangled in the code.

It's an interesting study, cause it proves that you have to tread lightly when it comes to the commercialization of a community project. I would venture to say that it's better to contribute monies and not mess around much with the daily runnings of things. Which is where SoftDeluxe, aka Informer, went wrong. They could of invested in the project instead, with the hope that it would grow and slowly introduce cross promotional activities. A benevolent approach would of kept the community and the core devs from forking off.

Ledo · 2009-05-08 12:29:05

but ended up getting tangled in the code.

If i understand things correctly 1.3 branch was dead end from the beginning. Markup stuff just couldn't be done correctly? Without drastically changing things. Extensions system probably become a bit to much too.

So better go on the different road than get stuck in dead end. Nothing wrong with that.

clintonmass · 2009-05-10 22:20:47

The whole reason I moved over to Flux was solely because of Informer. I used to be a big fan of Feed Digest when it was an indie project, and used it regularly and reliably. Then Informer took it over and left it to die on the vine, a shadow of its former self. Is this their track record? Do they just ignore projects they take over?

Paul · 2009-05-10 22:54:11

Ledo: 1.3 wasn't dead from the start. In the beginning it was supposed to consist of revised markup, language file support for admin, much improved accessibility including a revised parser, an improved post tracking system, possible pre moderation for posts and a few little tweaks here and there. After that Rickard and I were talking about UTF8 and a simple templating system for 1.4. That was all easily doable. Things started to get out of hand once the extension system reared its head. However, the extension system as originally conceived was only supposed to be a simple hack to allow one or two features to be added rather than true extensibility. Things went off the rails, at least from my perspective, once the extension system became the most important feature.

hcgtv · 2009-05-11 17:12:30

clintonmass wrote:

I used to be a big fan of Feed Digest when it was an indie project, and used it regularly and reliably. Then Informer took it over and left it to die on the vine, a shadow of its former self. Is this their track record? Do they just ignore projects they take over?

It appears to be the case. Either Informer has a ton of money to waste or they got into buying up properties without anyone on board who could understand community dynamics.

Informer was SoftDeluxe before they got into the web presence. When the sale of PunBB was in play, I started doing some research, a quick whois of the softdeluxe.com domain yielded the person behind it, Victor Sazhin (picture here). I immediately tried to contact Victor, I wanted to know what his intentions were for PunBB. He went about ignoring me, shades of things to come I thought.

Victor, et al., went about buying up web presences and when the domain name changed from punbb.org to punbb.informer.com, I figured that their purchase of PunBB was for it's links back in the footers of thousands of forums and it's high Google page ranking. When the core devs decided to fork, my suspicions came true, PunBB was sacrificed for the greater good.

SuperMAG · 2009-05-11 19:51:54

hahaha what a story.

hcgtv · 2009-05-12 03:27:31

Paul wrote:

After that Rickard and I were talking about UTF8 and a simple templating system for 1.4.

Quick question Paul.

Did you and Rickard have to sign something that prevents either of you from saying anything about Informer or what transpired? I find it real odd that Rickard has left for good, and you seem to tiptoe around things, like you have a gag order or something.

I think it's one of the reasons that people are hesitant about things, not knowing where Pun ends and Flux begins.

Paul · 2009-05-12 11:12:43

There is nothing odd about Rickard leaving for good and I'm sure he would have left sooner if it hadn't been for the sale. The simple fact is he didn't really have the time to commit to Pun anymore and the offer to buy came at the right time for him. There is no gag order, its just not my place to reveal details of what is Rickard's business.

hcgtv · 2009-05-12 14:38:49

Paul wrote:

There is nothing odd about Rickard leaving for good and I'm sure he would have left sooner if it hadn't been for the sale.

I do find it odd that he just walked away for good from a project that he ran for years from a computer in his kitchen.

Paul wrote:

The simple fact is he didn't really have the time to commit to Pun anymore and the offer to buy came at the right time for him.

I was happy for Rickard, he was about to get married, so the offer did come at the right time for him. He did nothing wrong in my eyes, Informer screwed it up badly, well shit happens.

Paul wrote:

There is no gag order, its just not my place to reveal details of what is Rickard's business.

I wasn't asking you to do tabloid journalism, I just feel that you're cautious what you say and I was just wondering why.

xable · 2009-05-12 14:45:14

Whatever has happened I don`t think it`s good to keep dragging it up, leave it in the past and lets move forward. Which is what the majority is doing already, I`m trying to anyway.

hcgtv · 2009-05-13 03:07:30

xable wrote:

Whatever has happened I don`t think it`s good to keep dragging it up, leave it in the past and lets move forward.

I've been talking about what Informer has done to the PunBB project. In responding to Paul about why he's been so quiet, I talked about the past, yes.

xable wrote:

Which is what the majority is doing already, I`m trying to anyway.

Both this forum and the one over at PunBB has the capability to ban a user. If they don't want to hear what Bert has to say, the admins have the power.

Pedro · 2009-05-15 23:24:36

For whatever it worths I'll drop my opinions too.

First of all, it looks like people finally feel distant enough to discuss this reasonably away from flamewars. About damn time.

In my opinion you (hctv) already pointed out the source of the 'screw up' regardless you noticing it or not.

If they would have any use for Punbb and wanted to be active in it, seriously, what was stopping them from doing it? Contributing with plugins, patches, fork it, sell support, whatever... why didn't they do that?
Honestly it sound to me that their goals were not anywhere along the lines of free software. Like... what does buying the copyright do? If we talk about the software real value, the answer is: nothing.

That is in fact the essence of GPL license: the value of the software is itself, not a label you put on it or a usage agreement or whatever.

I'd also state that the fork that gave origin to fluxbb was the right thing to do IMHO.

As for Rickard, he moved on, I believe that's the most natural thing to do at sometime of whomever's life in whatever situation. I am glad he got a bit of money from writing punbb.

The way flux went after the fork was a mistake in my opinion. May might disagree with that, but release cycle planning does mater to some extent.
Personally I think 1.3 should have been release with whatever markup it has long ago. I don't see the point of focusing so much on 1.2, it's time has long passed.

sirena · 2009-05-17 10:29:36

I personally think the whole fork was a mistake.

It was an impassioned decision to fork, but like most impassioned decisions it didn't really make much sense the morning after.

When the Flux team dragged it's arse with releases, and core team members fell off the boat, the whole Flux fork looked quite weak and IMHO it continues to do so.

The PunBB folks have also had their issues in carrying forward, but in their defence they have managed to keep to a pretty good release cycle & developed official extensions etc etc, even though they have also had their own team changes etc to deal with.

Going forward the situation looks pretty messy, esp on the Flux side.

Meanwhile, other forums keep on improving....

hcgtv · 2009-05-17 15:24:09

Pedro wrote:

Honestly it sound to me that their goals were not anywhere along the lines of free software. Like... what does buying the copyright do? If we talk about the software real value, the answer is: nothing.

Whatever monies SoftDeluxe paid for PunBB, it was for the traffic to PunBB.org. I'm not privy to the logs anymore but I would venture to say that traffic is dieing down.

sirena wrote:

Meanwhile, other forums keep on improving....

Yes, but that's been the case for the last 3 years as we worked towards 1.3.

Honestly, and I'm not saying it as a Pun fanboy, there is no other forum that compares to Pun. You can download and install every PHP based forum in existence today and you'll find that Pun is one of the smallest downloads, one of the fastest at rendering pages and very easy on server resources.

PapyrusBB-0.6.zip                68.43 KB    
aterr-0.9.3.tar.gz                87.48 KB    
minibb.zip                        180.38 KB    
punbb-1.2.21.zip                248.68 KB
fluxbb-1.2.21.zip                249.31 KB
Vikingboard_0.1.2.zip            314.02 KB    
usebb-1.0.9.zip                    317.06 KB        
tairo_0_8_1beta.zip                345.79 KB
bbpress-0.9.0.3.zip                379.99 KB    
ovbb-0.16a.zip                    380.49 KB        
punbb-1.3.2.zip                    397.00 KB        
metaforum-0.1046.tar.gz            500.34 KB    
Vanilla-1.1.5a.zip                514.26 KB    
NuclearBB_Alpha_3.zip            648.23 KB
mercuryboard-1.1.5.zip            721.03 KB    
unb.stable.1.6.4.full.zip        780.30 KB    
deluxebb1_2.zip                    868.88 KB    
AEF(1.0.8)_Install.zip            1,041.76 KB    
icebb-1.0-rc10.zip                1,120.38 KB    
eliteboard_v2.1.1.zip            1,396.86 KB
EvilBoard_0.1a.zip                1,500.95 KB    
XMB-1.9.10-Patched.zip            1,548.50 KB    
smf_1-1-7_install.zip            1,705.68 KB    
mybb_1404.zip                    1,748.63 KB    
beehiveforum084.zip                2,046.60 KB
phpBB-3.0.4.zip                    2,242.81 KB    
viscacha-08rc5.zip                2,372.67 KB    
phorum-5.2.9a.zip                2,500.68 KB    
quicksilverforums-1.4.2.zip        3,519.57 KB    
netxbbs-0.5.3.zip                9,383.72 KB

You might say to yourself that small and light don't mean much, it's the wizz-bang features that denote a good piece of software. Then go tell it to those users that install web apps only to be shutdown by their hosting providers when their CPU usage goes too high as they start to build up traffic.

I may be out of the loop, and I've been upset about what has transpired, but I'll defend a good piece of software any day of the week.

theUg · 2009-05-17 15:44:41

I haven’t been on the forums lately and can’t say if it has been discussed a lot, but I’d like to point out to WordPress’ success. Both from the development standpoint (automatic updates of plug-ins and core software alone are enough to sell one’s soul to the devil), and marketing. I think popularity and development feed off of each other — the more popular software is, the more developers it attracts, and with pure manpower the mountains can be turned over.

So, what we need to look at is how to attract people (most valuable resource of any project) and how to organize their work in the most efficient manner for the project, and with the most satisfaction for the contributors.

hcgtv · 2009-05-18 16:00:25

theUg wrote:

I think popularity and development feed off of each other — the more popular software is, the more developers it attracts, and with pure manpower the mountains can be turned over.

You mention Wordpress, I'll mention Textpattern. Textpattern at present has one active developer, everybody has vacated the premises. I still use Textpattern but it's getting to the point where I'm looking at supporting it myself cause the future looks a bit bleak.

Why has Textpattern faltered? One reason is that they have kept it a good-ol-boy club, only a few developers can get in to their inner circle, and when they do get in, they forget what it was like to be on the outside drooling in. Also, tin-foil hat on, I think that it's a proving ground for would be Wordpress developers, tin-foil hat off.

In keeping Textpattern such a closed operation, the popularity of it has taken a major hit. Why spend the time adding text to a wiki that nobody really reads, or creating new plugins, or website themes and the list goes on and on.

The success of Wordpress can be attributed to Matt Mullenweg, this guy had a vision and didn't stop till he saw it come true. Textpattern had Dean Allen but he used the community to make a lot of money on Textdrive, a hosting company, then retired and left Textpattern without a leader to this day.

Every project needs a leader, do you know who your leader is?

theUg · 2009-05-18 16:21:52

Hmm, I didn’t even know that Textpattern endured such fate. I really liked it and considered it for my blog before settling for WP. TP has (had?) a lot of good ideas behind it.

MattF · 2009-05-18 16:41:11

hcgtv wrote:

Why has Textpattern faltered? One reason is that they have kept it a good-ol-boy club, only a few developers can get in to their inner circle

Conversely though, there are some good points to that approach. Take, for example, pre-Informer PunBB, (the core code), and then look at modifications over on Punres. Small group of developers who were seeing to the core code and then the public additions over on Punres. The core was always focused on security whereas a good amount of the modifications are absolutely scary where even the most basic of security considerations are concerned. Practically every modification I used originally has been practically, (or completely), rewritten from scratch for that very reason. I may have kept to the original concept of the mods, but most of the code most definitely not.

We all make mistakes and false assumptions when we start coding, and may not adhere to guidelines which we don't know about, (through inexperience/ignorance of the potential problems/risks), until those errors/omissions are pointed out to us, but there are also a lot of what could be termed as veteran coders who wouldn't know a security risk if it bit them on the arse.

Keeping a closed loop type setup where Devs are concerned does mean that one can control the quality. I've heard far too many people say that they either don't care where security is concerned, or that it isn't one of their primary considerations. That is just a plainly incorrect attitude.

It's the lesser of two evils. Faster development and less security or slower development and good security and coding practices. I know which of the two I would pick any day of the week.

MattF · 2009-05-18 16:44:38

theUg wrote:

Hmm, I didn’t even know that Textpattern endured such fate. I really liked it and considered it for my blog before settling for WP. TP has (had?) a lot of good ideas behind it.

Just deviating completely off-topic for a moment, (my apologies Bert, ), Ug, I posted some info on adding that guest question stuff to post.php somewhere on here for you a while ago. Just thought I'd mention it whilst I remember.

mad-wolfie · 2009-05-18 16:47:19

hcgtv wrote:

You might say to yourself that small and light don't mean much, it's the wizz-bang features that denote a good piece of software. Then go tell it to those users that install web apps only to be shutdown by their hosting providers when their CPU usage goes too high as they start to build up traffic.

this is so true.. to be honest i've dabbled in other forms of forum software & always find myself coming back here to the Flux/Pun forum scripts.. why, well apart from the obvious flaws of certain other forum software which doesn't seem to be dealt with by it's developers with their "yeah, yeah, we will fix it one day" attitudes & the outstanding support team here, well there is one major reason... yes the feature packed forums are nice but 1) they clog up bandwidth unneccesarily 2) many of the features in the software never get used & remain switched off for security purposes or because there is no point them being there, plus 3) the more gadgets & toys you have to play with, the more likely things are to go wrong or get exploited by hackers & spammers & 4) the more complicated the script/features the slower the forum reacts & you get various problems with different browser & devices - pun & flux so far are all multi-platform & i can read this forum on a mobile phone with web browser on a very slow connection - sometimes being seen is the best policy rather than having sparkly toys to play with.

Basically a simple forum works best & as i've said before on here, if you want features such as private messaging, karma/reputation marking, online games, gallery & picture uploading etc they are available to add as plug-ins or via some simple php editing & database changes via punres & all are down to your choice, not what a developer insists you should have. What is the point running a big feature packed forum on a website hosting package with only 10mb of space, then things like enabling image uploads etc in the script which would never get used, why not switch to a simple forum & have done with!!

It's common knowledge the simple ideas are the best - hence the inventors of the most simple things are up there among the very richest people in the world. A lot of people tell me they like the forum sites i've built purely on the basis they are clean & simple to navigate around - they don't have to go through 10 mouse clicks to find a page or wade through rubbish that they aren't interested in & again this point of the site loading quickly also helps - especially when they are trying to find information during a tea-break at work or when the boss has his back turned.

I will admit though, i would like to see Rikard come back, more so if he came this way towards FluxBB.. granted he has his new life & I believe got married etc (congrats) soon after the informer "takeover", but it would be nice for him to be involved... not so much coming in as a developer but as a technical advisor in some way.. even if he just came on the forum here & chirped up once in a while with support.

So has FluxBB screwed up a good open source project.. well not in my opinion, they have given it a new lease of life & i'm guessing this is how Rickard would of liked to of seen his 1 man project turn out. OK 1.3 had a baptism of fire & such, but as i also said here, if the people here (many of who have worked with Rickard for a few years before going solo) say the project isn't ready, then as far as i'm concerned, it isn't ready & informer made the mistake of getting the project running to try & score points for themselves. I'd sooner see a project fail or be abandoned at the development / beta stages rather than see a release that is rushed & has some pretty major flaws.

Forums

#1 2009-05-07 12:26:34

How to screw up an Open Source project

#2 2009-05-07 16:09:11

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#3 2009-05-07 16:18:54

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#4 2009-05-07 18:16:29

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#5 2009-05-07 19:47:32

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#6 2009-05-08 00:49:20

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#7 2009-05-08 12:29:05

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#8 2009-05-10 22:20:47

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#9 2009-05-10 22:54:11

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#10 2009-05-11 17:12:30

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#11 2009-05-11 19:51:54

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#12 2009-05-12 03:27:31

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#13 2009-05-12 11:12:43

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#14 2009-05-12 14:38:49

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#15 2009-05-12 14:45:14

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#16 2009-05-13 03:07:30

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#17 2009-05-15 23:24:36

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#18 2009-05-17 10:29:36

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#19 2009-05-17 15:24:09

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#20 2009-05-17 15:44:41

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#21 2009-05-18 16:00:25

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#22 2009-05-18 16:21:52

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#23 2009-05-18 16:41:11

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#24 2009-05-18 16:44:38

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

#25 2009-05-18 16:47:19

Re: How to screw up an Open Source project

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