Jason... Thoughts Media Engine distribution

[Skitals]

Obviously this entire site is built on a modified phpBB. I was just wondering if you are aware that you are obligated to give all of the code away given the request? phpBB is released under the GNU general public license. Publishing this site online is the equivalent of distributing a "binary" or compiled code since php is compiled server side:

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

Just wondering what your thoughts are on this (haha, get it... thoughts. ... oy).

[stitics]

Assuming that you are correct (and I have to assume that you are, since I know nothing about this kind of thing), and assuming that this is the first time you have mentioned this to PPCT, AND considering that this post may be stricken from the record, and/or myself punished...I would be inclined to think that you are something of an inconsiderate ass.

What kind of buffoon (after so many people have acknowledged the amounts of time and effort that have gone into this site) would bring that to the site master's attention on a public forum?

Hmmm, maybe I'm just in a bad mood.

[Anthony Caruana]

Perhaps it would have been a little more diplomatic to discuss this with Jason privately rather than raising it in a pubic forum.

This is where the open source "debate" (for want of a better word) gets confusing to me. It's one thing to acknowledge inteleectual property to get from someone else but it's quite another to have to give away your IP. I'm not taking a stand here but just because someone else wants to give something away it doesn't mean you have to as well. However, f it is a condition of using the "free" software that you have make available any enhancements you make to it then that's a differnt story.

It's all a little confusing for me :?

[davidspalding]

Would someone please explain to me what in the quoted license -- Gnu or otherwise -- requires site operators to freely distribute their customized mods to the phpBB platform? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think our troll here is misinterpreting the agreement. ,:|
____________

BTW, your web server seems to be down, Justin. Better get on that, Webmaster. Hup, two, three, four. Oh, wait, maybe it's your whole site. Ouch. Get on that, boy....

[madbart]

He just want someone else's hard work for nothing so he can make his **** site look as good and informative as this one! :boohoo:

[Jason Dunn]

Obviously this entire site is built on a modified phpBB. I was just wondering if you are aware that you are obligated to give all of the code away given the request? phpBB is released under the GNU general public license. Publishing this site online is the equivalent of distributing a "binary" or compiled code since php is compiled server side

It's kind of amusing that because you see the surface of the site you assume you know how the back-end works. :roll: You know what they say about assumptions. You'd look less silly if you had ASKED rather than accused.

We have made only very minor modifications to phpBB - 99% of the Thoughts Media Engine is completely modular and externalized for the very reasons that you specify. Our goal is to make these external modules forum-independent, meaning we could attach them to vBulletin or anything else and they would work. Right now they're designed to hook into phpBB, but if I were to turn over the phpBB code we have, it would look virtually identical to the phpBB 2.04 that you can download now. We didn't want to go down the road of hacking up the core code because it would make upgrading to newer versions a nightmare. As it stands now, we can upgrade to newer versions of phpBB with no hassle at all.

I don't know exactly what your purpose was in bringing this up here in a public forum - were you trying to chastise us because you felt we were doing something wrong? Or because you felt you now had a "right" to the work that we've done? Either way, I don't appreciate it all that much. :?

[GoldKey]

Definitely could have been addressed more discretely.

To add to what Anthony said, the quote from Skitals makes no mention of having to distribute any enhancements made.

Also, the statement "Publishing this site online is the equivalent of distributing a "binary" or compiled code since php is compiled server side" seems a bit of a leap, but I am not an atty.

Skitals, is PDAtweaks.com an actual site? While I see the domain is registered, nothing comes up when I go to the site.

[aroma]

This is where the open source "debate" (for want of a better word) gets confusing to me. It's one thing to acknowledge inteleectual property to get from someone else but it's quite another to have to give away your IP. I'm not taking a stand here but just because someone else wants to give something away it doesn't mean you have to as well. However, f it is a condition of using the "free" software that you have make available any enhancements you make to it then that's a differnt story.

It's all a little confusing for me :?

When software, such as phpBB, is distributed under the GNU General Public License, then users have access to the source code and can modify this source code for their own purposes. However, by executing your rights under this GNU license, and modifying the software, then you must also honor the license for your modified source code, and make it freely accessable to the public as well. However, in this case, as Jason explained, they didn't do much modification to the source code, they've created modules which hook into any forum system, in this case it's phpBB, so this whole disscusion is mute.

- Aaron

[entropy1980]

Public question in a public forum don't see what the big deal is, it's obvious you use phpBB and the GNU license and GPL is an interesting thing and it's probably best it was brought up at some point publicly so everyone is clear there is no wrong doing. :worried:

[lurch]

It's kind of amusing that because you see the surface of the site you assume you know how the back-end works. :roll: You know what they say about assumptions. You'd look less silly if you had ASKED rather than accused.

Hmm.. from yesterday & today (regarding subscriber services):

I hate em.
I have a mental list of people I know will never subscribe to the site, and you're on it Fishie - no one is forcing you to subscribe, so at the very least do me the courtesy of not bad-mouthing our new system.
Dude id love to sign up
Thing is i dont have paypal nor a visa card.
So im screwed.
Oh. 8O

Case in point! ;) ;) ;)

[Jason Dunn]

Case in point! ;) ;) ;)

Touche! Smackdown taken and accepted. :oops: :D

[Janak Parekh]

Hmm.. from yesterday & today (regarding subscriber services):
That comparison is night and day, though. If you read Fishie's first post, it doesn't come out as an assumption. It's a miscommunication.

In any case, if you are truly curious, the phpBB "backend" and the "frontend" that is the Thoughts Media Engine communicate primarily through an SQL database, and not by direct method calls in the same source.

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

Perhaps it would have been a little more diplomatic to discuss this with Jason privately rather than raising it in a pubic forum.
Absolutely.

This is where the open source "debate" (for want of a better word) gets confusing to me. It's one thing to acknowledge inteleectual property to get from someone else but it's quite another to have to give away your IP.
You're misreading the intent of the GPL, I think, and that is the source of the confusion. Assume I'm the phpBB author. My premise is that "I want this code to be freely shared by everyone, and I don't want other people profiting off of my code by integrating it into their closed-source product."

I do agree with those who feel this isn't truly "free" in the English sense of the word, but "free", just like any other word used with open source software, is heavily overloaded by different people.

Also, mind you, this is not the only open-source license. The BSD license is the most popular license for open-source software that can be integrated into closed-source software, so long as the copyrights are still maintained in the source.

--janak

[Skitals]

Im really sorry Jason, I think everyone took this the wrong way. I was never asking for the code myself, I was just concerned for you because (I had assumed) you were building your little Thoughts Media empire :wink: on open source code. I guess I was curious what you would do if someone demanded the code. But hey, look at my post time... its was 3:20 am!

I am very impressed with what you (or whoever your coder(s) are/is) have done with the site php-wise. Even more so if you could plug it into any other forum (I guess it would just be a matter of changing the tables and such it grabs from in the database). Very awsome :D

I feel really bad for not making my intentions clear in my first post. Now that we know that this isnt an issue, can we continue the discussion as if it was? Im just interested in this whole public license thing and how to interpret it.

Firstly I copy and pasted that stuff directly from the license distibuted with phpBB. I will break down how I understood:

You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form

Now obviously you have the 'source' code residing on your server and when a php page is called the php-parser translates or 'compiles' it server side, and what we get is a pretty html page. So you are distributing the compiled code. So under this license you are allowed to do this "provided that you also do one of the following" ... and it goes on to list the 3 conditions I stated earlier.

Is this interpretation correct? Again Jason, I understand this doesnt apply, and I apologize for coming off the wrong way. I'm just more curious about how you guys interpret the license.

[GoldKey]

Justin,

Still can't get to your site. Sound interesting from the title though.

[Skitals]

The site is gone as of earlier this week... whenever PocketMatrix moved servers (they were hosting my site but their sponsor pulled the plug on them :? ... thanks you guys at PM).

And actually no, it wasnt that interesting :) I stopped updating it like a year ago. Since then it was only being updated a couple times a month by some other people (Kirk Stepehns, Rod B). The site never even had forums cause I didnt want to divide the PPC community more then it already is (haha, like that would have happened anyway).

If you search the front page news you can see my site was mentioned a few times here at PPCT.

My post count is low (half are from this week i think) but I have been a member for a while, and came here a long time before I signed up. I suffer from too-many-hobbies disease. Xbox, computers, PDA's, cars, reptiles, etc, etc.

[Jason Dunn]

Now obviously you have the 'source' code residing on your server and when a php page is called the php-parser translates or 'compiles' it server side, and what we get is a pretty html page. So you are distributing the compiled code. So under this license you are allowed to do this "provided that you also do one of the following" ... and it goes on to list the 3 conditions I stated earlier.

I'm not an open-source GPL expert, but I don't think that an HTML page compiled from various sources, one of them being free forum software, automatically makes everything on it free. What about my writing? Everything written here by me or anyone else is automatically their own intellectual propertly. Graphics? Those aren't now "open source" because they show up on this page.

I think compiled code = compiled code, meaning the binaries, not the HTML they spit out.

As one of my developers said (I'm paraphrasing): "We can GZIP our /forums folder where phpBB lives, and anyone can have it - there's nothing special in there".

I had actually emailed the phpBB guys and asked them about the possibility of bundling phpBB with the Thoughts Media Engine, because I too was confused about whether or not I could sell something that ran on top of something that was free, and they never responded to me. So we kept everything separate, and it still is separate.

[Skitals]

What I also found interesting going through the license is the free software obviously comes with no warrenty. You are allowed to sell the software for a profit in return for warrenty service!

If that's true, you could sell the engine bundled with phpBB given that you provide a warrenty.

I just thought it was interesting cause I dont normally think of php as "source code" and the output html as the "compiled" version, just wondering how others interpreted it.