[dojo-contributors] forums

[Alex Russell]

On Thursday 07 December 2006 4:56 am, Amit Green wrote:
> Team,
>
>     * Forums is a great idea :)
>     * A major concern is the ability to take out what is in the forum
>       into a text file and port it to another forum software (most
> open source forum software uses mysql, which can easily be dumped;
> and therefore meets this requirement)
>     * I have a concern with "hackability" with open-source software
> that has a different license than Dojo, as follows:
>           o  If development is done on the software to improve it
> (i.e.: to integrate dojo into it, to improve it, and "make the UI
> rock even more");
>           o And that development then ends up improving dojo (i.e.:
> we want to port back some of the changes into dojo); o Then, at least
> theoretically, the changes ported back might have tiny pieces of code
> subject to the license of the other open source software.
>     * The above implies (to a paranoid person such as myself) that if
>       any "hackability" is done on any, nothing should be backported.

That's bogus. We own the copyrights to the patches we create. Should you 
write a patch for something licensed incompatibly, that in no way 
reduces your ability to contribute it to Dojo, so long as what you 
contribute is wholly owned by you. I would like it if we could NOT 
focus on licensing FUD as a key determiner for this project.

The most of the rest of our infrastructure software is (L)GPL. We just 
need to suck it up and move on.

>     * As for forums I am comfortable with, I have only used two (both
> of them for many months):
>           o phpBB, which I hate.
>           o SMF (Simple Machines Forums), which I neither love or
> hate, but is "usuable".  And it does function.
>     *  Although, SMF would not be "hackable" given my concerns above.
>     * SMF does not have fully automatic notification, only partial on
> a per forum, and then on a per posting.  We could probably write a
> php/mysql script that on new messages & responses, to
>       automatically adds people that are subscribed to that forum to
>       subscribe to that message.  However, we are talking ~20 hours
> of work to write it & qa it & test it.  And then that software would
> be stuck in SMF license:
>       http://www.simplemachines.org/about/license.php

Doesn't sound like there's a strong recommendation in there for either 
system, or am I reading it wrong?

Regards

-- 
Alex Russell
alex at sitepen.com     A99F 8785 F491 D5FD 04D7 ACD9 4158 FFDF 2894 6876
alex at dojotoolkit.org BE03 E88D EABB 2116 CC49 8259 CF78 E242 59C3 9723
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