SurfiOnline

From their announcement made this morning (coincidence, after I made my post?)

The future of LiteBulletin?
Well LiteBulletin was meant to be an exact copy of vBulletin 3 but our mind changed and so our next upcoming version (1.2) will have own templates and a fresh and new designed style which is definately not vB-ish.

What about some vB-like phrases?
Things like “Visitor Message System” reminds too much of vB so we will rename that to “Profile Comment System” as it also describes what you can do with that. There is also a few more things we will rename and change to make LiteBulletin much more original.
Until now LiteBulletin could be called “LitevBulletin” or “vBulletin Lite” as it is too much like it.

Read the full announcement.

It’s good to see (I’m assuming they’ve read my post) that they’re respecting our wishes with why we opened MyBB up and just how cheap creating a vBulletin knock-off really is. Still waiting on the website, favourite icon etc to change. We’ll see if that magically happens today too.

When we relaunched MyBB under the GNU GPL license (open source), we did so to help out the open source community and to hopefully see something new and original. We also did so as we believed we’d receive some valuable contributions back to the MyBB community. We didn’t release MyBB under the GNU GPL so people would take MyBB, and turn it in to cheap clone of a competitors product. Whilst there’s technically nothing wrong or illegal doing so, it’s disappointing to see.

LiteSoft are developing LiteBulletin, a direct clone of the vBulletin user interface plastered directly on top of MyBB with the addition of vBulletin’s recently developed social networking features (social profiles, comments, etc). Of course, LiteSoft did this and at the same time vBulletin caught up with them as (I’ve heard) they were using actual images from vBulletin itself. They’ve now changed the infringing material.

I just thought I’d also take a look at the LiteSoft website to see what they’re up to with their project, and not surprisingly they’ve also essentially taken the layout of the vBulletin website! Do they not have the ability to come up with a design and content themselves? Even the spacing is essentially pixel for pixel! (You’ll notice their screenshot too contains the infringed theme images)

Don’t even get me started on the favourite icon…

The reason why this is particularly annoying to myself (and no doubt some of the MyBB team) is that this isn’t going to help the “MyBB is a vBulletin clone” comments that come past every so often. Whilst LiteBulletin is it’s own separate product, it’s based directly of MyBB and MyBB is mentioned in both the source code and on the footer of the forums.

The LiteBulletin Features page too, seems to bare quite a few similarities in layout to the vBulletin Features page whilst the content bares quite a few similarities to the MyBB Features page. (Whilst MyBB is GNU GPL software, our website and the content of our website is NOT)

If imitation is indeed considered a sincere form of flattery, vBulletin must be pretty happy right now.

If you’re thinking of forking MyBB, then please, I urge you to not be like LiteBulletin – instead develop something new and unique. Improve upon what everyone’s expectations of discussion software is.