Brett_Tabke - 5:23 pm on Oct 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

I am sorta surprised by some of the comments I have read here and on the web about this issue. So lets recap:

-> VB owners sold vb and all IP to IB a couple years ago. There were no backdoors. It was everything.
-> vb was started as a port/copy/ripoff of UBB. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vbulletin)
-> less than a year after the sale, former vb owners were talking of starting a forum.

> They were in beta

It is pretty certain IB probably has a copy of the code. The forums looked and acted pretty much like VB. When I went to their site, i thought it *was* VB. Of course IB is going to defend a product they purchased. Legally, there is no question who defrauded here. You sell a product - you sell a product - end of story - move on. However, given that the original VB was a (their words) a port/copy/rippoff of UBB, it shouldn't be a surprise. Just because source code is available, doesn't make it open source.

> v4

Agreed. v3 and earlier was extremely poor at "community". It's main goal was to wow administrators and sell copies.

However, v4 is very interesting. We have been using it on another site since the launch and are finding it very user friendly. It is as if someone mixed a modern forum, Word Press, and a CMS together in an integrated system. I think it has a huge future. It could displace wordpress as the prolevel software of choice.



> not a fan of IB but did the ex-vb guys start xenforo from scratch?

If you go to their site, you can't tell whether you are looking at vb3 or their software. No programmer blows away years of work.

The salt-n-pepper in the timing of this, is that with the suit per-empting the launch, they can now go back and switch more code and make it look vastly different internally. The problem IB will have on that front is finding a judge with the technical brain to understand that. However, that also might make the judge more inclined to look at the overall picture of a guy selling the code and then turning around and building and selling a similar product.

Either way, sounds like there were iron glad non-competes in place and active. I'd give 5 to 1 odds in IB's favor on this one.