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I would say that vBulletin is your best choice. It has a huge amount of features you're going to love.

Seriously, building something like vBulletin would take you years with all the front-end and admin panel features. It is also customizable to every site so that it can look the same as your site (but maintains the usability users have adjusted to on other sites). This is also performance thing apart from features - you most likely lack the knowledge to make high performance forum as good as vBulletin guys have.

I've seen large sites that have connected their website with vBulletin, so it is possible. Not only that, but vBulletin actually has vBulletin Connect that lets you build your website around vBulletin. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) also support vBulletin directly.

One specific large site I use daily did convert from their proprietary system they had used for more than 10 years. vBulletin was their choice, and while it did take a few months to convert that old system, the forum now works much better and supports way more features that users like. If you are making a new site you can obviously do it correctly the first time and skip the conversion.
If you are doing this as work for a professional site, I would stay away from phpBB and other free solutions. While it's possible to use them, you don't get any support and they're hard to integrate exactly the way you want to. They also tend to lack on the features that something like vBulletin has.

vBulletin really is your best choice. It's a little pricy, but for what you get the price is more than justified.

You need to review other non-GPL commercial products that offer open code. Like VBulletin board.
Which states:

By installing and using vBulletin on your server, you agree to the following terms and conditions.....

* vBulletin license grants you the right to run one instance (a single installation) of the Software on one web server and one web site for each license purchased. Each license may power one instance of the Software on one domain. For each installed instance of the Software, a separate license is required. Modifications to the Software or database to circumvent the one-license-one-board rule are prohibited.
* The Software is licensed only to you. You may not rent, lease, sublicense, sell, assign, pledge, transfer or otherwise dispose of the Software in any form, on a temporary or permanent basis, without the prior written consent of Jelsoft.
.....
* The Software source code may be altered (at your risk)
.....

DONE! OPEN CODE (not open source) with all the rights of commercial copyrights and licensing requirements.

http://www.vbulletin.com/

How is vBulletin open source? This license doesn't look like open source at all to me.

...other than the inclusionists and deltionists.

My biggest issue with Wikipedia has been bias and conflict of interest. Far too many times I've run into situations where information I had seen before was removed by someone closely guarding the article, almost obsessively so. Be it anything critical (but factual) about the topic at hand, you'll see pages upon pages of bickering in the talk section about it. More often than not, those who absolutely refuse to allow critical information in these articles were either associated to who/what the article is about... or, even worse: associated to who/what the article is about AND a Wikipedia admin.

A great example is the Fark article. Obsessed with eliminating provable, citeable information that would be "negative" about Fark itself, the same people who throw their weight down and use their privileges to enforce what they want left out of the article... end up being Fark moderators as well.

The conflict of interest involved in this one specific example prevents any person's ability to remove bias and lack of neutrality from the article. Instead, information that 20+ people are trying to keep into the article are overruled by one administrator who desires to keep something potentially seen as negative out of the article itself.

My example in this case: How Fark Shadowbans paying users and continues to solicit for subscription renewals without telling them that nobody can see their posts but themselves. Very similar to the Conventry mode in vBulletin.

I'm the administrator @ NeoSmart Technologies.... It's not a IIS failure, it's a PHP bug. View all links related to this particluar bug in PHP 5.1.6 The site will be back up soon! http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20 4522 Damn PHP......

Maybe a seperate email system could be phased in over 10 years that does not connect to the original that where participaints are certified and heavily fined for not controlling spam. I would make space on the business card for this second address. This would prevent gateways but I bet our company would switch over if the cost was right.

However, I can see from the PKI movement that changing email is a very slow process and friction is easily dismissed and disguarded. I am a PKI user/nut myself and the mailers and standards are still a bit of a problem.

But you are the one who is wrong. MySQL is a server. Thus, you don't generally (and by generally, I mean 99% of the time) have to actually INCLUDE MySQL in your code. Because you don't have to include it and are instead accessing a separate MySQL server, whether running locally or elsewhere, you are not bound by the GPL and can license your program any way you want.

Now, if you're making a device or custom software that includes the MySQL server code itself, that's different, but I personally have never heard of such things (though I'm sure they exist), which suggests to me that most people are doing what I'm doing: Making websites in PHP / Python / Perl / what-have-you that ACCESS MySQL servers but don't actually include MySQL code.

How else do you think commercial products like X-Cart, VBulletin and the like could exist? They're certainly not under the GPL.

Do you know how many databases have your personal details captured? Can you remember all the places you provided...

- Your date for birth
- Your postcode
- Your home phone number

Ever registered on a site running vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com/), just for starters?

And how hard would it be to determine...

- The model of car you drive
- Your mothers maiden name
- What type of pet you own

How many bloggers would find that information already shows up on Google?

A power outage has taken down wikipedia! as a community we must carry the torch!

Check phpBB (open source, free, very popular) or vBulletin (also excellent, but commercial).

By the way, on the topic of Internet Explorer standards, I was having a chat with, Tony Chor, the group project manager for the Windows Internet Explorer team. He told me: with GDI it was difficult to properly implement alpha transparency years ago, the IE team was split up after IE6 was released and the new IE team is working on getting IE up to par with standards. I didn't ask what version standards support would be improved in as I was jumping for joy over that. My guess is Longhorn.
-Shining Arcanine

First of all, I completely agree that some of the EULA clauses in proprietary software are absurd. (If I remember correctly, Microsoft did remove the benchmark testing clause at some point, however.)

But open source software has some equally bad doozies.

For instance, I write a software application similar to phpMyAdmin. It's open-source by nature since it's written in PHP, but I don't use the GPL or a free software license -- I sell the code and the users are then free to make any modifications they wish, but they have no redistribution rights (much like the vBulletin license.)

This software lets clients update a database easily. It uses MySQL as the backend.

Recently, MySQL changed their client license to the GPL. This means that ANY application that uses the MySQL client software (e.g. mysql_connect() and mysql_query() in PHP) must now be GPL, or you must pay a license fee to MySQL. This has upset many developers, and it will cause PHP itself to drop the MySQL client libraries since PHP isn't a GPL application. (The MySQL client libraries will be a separate download.)

Basically, the MySQL license change has polarized the development community into those who say "F*ck 'em; everything should be under the GPL anyway" and those who say that MySQL led everyone along until it became popular, and then decided to cut off their developers.

I have four choices now:
1) Release my application under the GPL, which grants redistribution rights to anyone I sell it to (i.e. anyone could buy it once and put up the application on Joe Blow's Download Site for free). I don't consider this a viable option because I don't want to allow redistribution rights for free.
2) Pay $220 per server to MySQL for my application. That is to say, pay $220 for our database server, and force my clients to pay $220 if they don't want to use our database server and hosting service. I don't consider this a viable option either, because I feel that it's blackmail.
3) Only use old versions of MySQL with my application.
4) Switch to PostgreSQL.

Obviously, #3 and #4 are what I've decided on. This means porting over 2500 lines of code to ADOdb (a database-independent PHP layer which I have used before with great success) and then testing everything with PostgreSQL instead. It means learning an entirely new database, and it means pulling ALL of my existing customers to a new database.

So while you may say that "Microsoft suxx0rs" because of their EULAs, I say that open-source often does the same thing. Look at Red Hat's absurd EOL policy. Why? Because they've finally figured out what step 2 in the following equation is:

1) Release open-source software
2) Charge people money for your product after you've locked then in, since they've already decided to base a business/software product around it
3) Profit!!

Only this won't work for MySQL, and it won't work for Red Hat either. I'm switching away from both. They've both been great for me, but I don't consider blackmail a viable business plan.

I have had 2 successful dealing with making money on the internet.

The first was with my ex-employer. They provided online mail, administration tools and a portal page to schools across Australia, New Zealand, UK and Hong Kong. They also acted as a service provider for several hundred schools in Victoria, Australia.

They were able to make money because of a couple of key reasons. Firstly, schools have to be held far more accountable than the average home user. If a home user uses a product illegally, usually not too much is done. If a school does this, the Principal has the right to fire the IT manager (or whoever is in charge of software/hardware management), and most guys prefer not to lose their jobs over something like that.

Another key was that they kept all of the software online on their own (or leased) hardware. This meant that software was never installed on clients computers, making it easier to track who was on the system, how much they were using etc. This is a sucessful business with around 50 employees.

I also run my own webpage and message board which has around 100 paid members and 2 major sponsors at the moment. Membership costs $10. I consider this quite successful as I originally never wrote the site to make money. I also ran the site without Members for 2 1/2 years before we started accumulating Members. There were several keys to this. The first was having the right website and code development to handle what we wanted. Some of the big sites spend a LOT of money getting this to work, the first problem.

Once we had that, due to a very good standing with readers, most people were more than happy to pay $10 for the year to help support the website. It didn't matter to them that they could get the same information for free anyway, they just wanted to support the site and be considered official members. This has helped me to upgrade the site further (trophies for event days, upgrade the message board to vBulletin (coming real soon) and several other benefits.

The key is providing something that my readers want at a fair price, trying to look after their wants, and providing them with useful information. I also have a couple of sponsors but this discussion isn't about that.

Cheers

Ok, I've not read the article (too tired to understand it probably anyway), but I have read a lot of the comments above.

The author is not advocating all software should be given away - he's saying that when software is sold, the package should include source code as well as binary.

As a counter-example to the parent, I would like to present vBulletin. The only (real) way of distributing PHP scripts is to distribute the source. vBulletin sells the source code, and this money pays for ongoing development and support costs. Customers can modify the code, but it is not supported if they do that.

And since people pay up front for the (unlimited) support as part of the whole package, it is a good reason for us to write quality software - to keep support costs down.

So yes, the method of software distribution advocated by the author of the article can and does work and there is money in it.

People don't generally want to participate in a venture whose sole role is to make some other a$$hole wealthy; and hey, that's appropriate. People's own interests have to be taken into account. There has to be an emormously strong draw, a type of community that can't be found elsewhere. The geek community that makes up /., the intelligent nouveau liberals that makes up salon.com's table talk, etc. And even in these two cases, the commercial aspects have largely been focused elsewhere at the time the community started.

Communities have to feel free to post whatever they want, whenever they want, for example, to truly be effective at being communities. Commercial ventures won't withstand that sort of thing. They have to allow endless criticism of themselves, their products, their staff, their management... how many public companies would go for that?

Communities have to feel that they will continue to exist, that their feet won't be pulled out from under them because the last quarter was a bad one or because their favorite moderator was laid off.

Take a look at this list of mostly-successful communities running vBulletin and see how many are commercial in nature. There's a reason for that!

There's a reason why I wrote my sig the way I did -- and BTW, I wrote this sig a week ago, so this is not just some self-serving situation. My own community is over ten years old, having survived as a local BBS, a netted BBS, a telnet BBS and now finally (as of a week ago) a web-based community. Some of the people there have been there since the inception. If it successfully makes the transition to web-based community, it will be because the users wanted it, not me. And that's my final point: you simply can't force community into existence!