Money, money, money...

Captain Joined: Jan 17, 2003 Posts: 629 Location: Europe

What do you think of the new Commercial License offer of FB?

I think he is infringing third-party's rights, NukeCops included.

Click here

Joined: Jan 31, 2004 Posts: -88

read his reply.

The commercial licence for copyright removal only applies to the modules that he wrote, and PHP-Nuke itself.

All other copyright information (for stuff like phpBB) remains there.

AI

Captain Joined: Jan 17, 2003 Posts: 629 Location: Europe

When money is involved all our good common-sense arguments may have no whatsoever value before the court. A professional DMCA lawyer should say his/her word.

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

I think he would be better off if he removed the GPL license claim. I have no bones about him charging for the removal, but he needs to consider changing the license to something like free to use with restrictions or whatever. He has put too many restrictions on the GPL with the meta tags especially. Where is THAT protected in the GPL license?

Joined: Jan 31, 2004 Posts: -88

the only thing he can restrict is the copyright notice officially.

As far as i'm aware, there'll be 2 versions of nuke. 1 on commercial licence (all 3rd party stuff's copyright will be there) which won't have the PHP-Nuke copyrights (this is legal), and one version on the GNU which will have all the copyright information there.

If FB starts to get really arsey about it, then he'll just suffer the consequences of more than 70% of the nuke community not using PHP-Nuke any more and going for CMS's like e107 or PostNuke - especially being that all hte current PHP-Nuke developers will be going the same way.

AI

Posted: Fri May 02, 2003 4:42 am

$250 for a 1 year license is a ripoff, I can only imagine what a lifetime license would cost. Every year a person must pay $250 just to remove copyright.php files and Powered by PHP-Nuke? At the rate of $250 per a domain (and I know some nuke users have more than 3 domains utilizing phpnuke) FB will become the next Bill Gates but not at my expense. For $250 a year I'll keep my copyright.php files and my $$ at the same time. I've never paid $250 a year for the same software and I'm not about to start now. Micro$oft give you a lifetime license for software less than $250. I don't pay $250 a year for web hosting, yikes!

For the price that FB has offer phpnuke should come with a guarantee that there's no bugs and definitely no security risk. A person like me would keep him in court the first time my website got hacked or tons of bugs appeared for that price. FB need a guarantee or some kind of warranty attached to that offer that a customer is 100% satisfied or Better Business Bureau would hear from me and others filing complaints about the software. We're talking $$ and when it come to $$ there's more to it than just removing a copyright notice.

Major Joined: Jan 13, 2003 Posts: 892

I was hoping the fee would be a little lower but the demand was there all along. Its a beginning. Of what remains to be seen.

Captain Joined: Jan 17, 2003 Posts: 629 Location: Europe

He is not selling the script, he's just sellin the right to remove some copyright messages, which many a nuker do without any legal consequences.

Meanwhile a new free CMS has appeared on the market, with all the former PostNuke developers in the team. So far ugly, but its core is the embodied CMS-architecture goddess itself.

http://www.xaraya.com

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

http://e107.org will be a definite contender. I've been following this one for about a year. It's good, but young.

Joined: Jan 31, 2004 Posts: -88

Imago wrote:

He is not selling the script, he's just sellin the right to remove some copyright messages, which many a nuker do without any legal consequences.

Meanwhile a new free CMS has appeared on the market, with all the former PostNuke developers in the team. So far ugly, but its core is the embodied CMS-architecture goddess itself.

http://www.xaraya.com

$250?????? Surprised

I should have read the article. That's extortion. Forget the 70% i said before, make that 99.99999% of nukers going elsewhere.

I for one will be skipping over to e107 if the free version ever starts to falter.

Jeeze. I knew he was arrogant and a bit self-obsessed, but this is ridiculous, I thought he had more intelligance than this.

How can he possibly think anybody will pay that much????? For $250 you can buy Red Hat Linux Enterprise, subscribe to the Red Hat Network on full coverage and support, buy Star Office, and still have money to go out on a big boozer down the pub.

AI

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

Thanks for restoring my faith AI Laughing

. I couldn't believe that you were so passive about this. Take an aspirin - lie down - it'll be better later.

Captain Joined: Jan 17, 2003 Posts: 629 Location: Europe

One of the Russian nukers commented on the news in this way:

"Anyone who knows what is Notepad and how to search within can remove the copyrights, totally free at that."

Major Joined: Jan 13, 2003 Posts: 892

I do think something like $35-45 for a single domain for a single version would be reasonable. (Not counting bug fix releases in the versions but major versions)

I'd prolly go for something like that but I'm in the boat with the rest of ya's. I'm willing to proudly display the PHPNuke CopyRight for $250 a year.

General Joined: Mar 22, 2003 Posts: 5233 Location: USA

Quoting from the poll at phpnuke.org

Quote:

Re: What do you think about the new Commercial License? (Score: 1)
by Heartz on Friday, May 02 @ 09:19:08 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message)

There's no way I'm buying this.

To be clear, all one needs to do is to modify the code, a little bit and call it whatever they want. GPL allows you to do this. As long as you leave the Francisco's copyrights on the source code and you also distribute your modifications out for free, you can do just about anything you want with the code. So commercial license would not appeal to me.

There is NOTHING in GPL that says that I have to keep Francisco's copyright on the generated files. As long as it's acknowledged in the code it's alright. Deal with it. It's childish to say that one must keep the copyright at the bottom of each page.

I have always seen this as more of the 'Letter of the law / Spirit of the law" or ethical/moral vs. legal. I have been reading as much as I can find on this subject over the past 2 months and I have to agree with the quoted item above. The GPL does not require that it be displayed anywhere. I do it out of respect, but FB is getting kindof intolerable again as he did a while back when he 'closed' developement, etc. To be honest with you, if I leave nuke, I hurt the people I enjoy helping. But, I am very close to switching to e107 as my personal site software and will then just support phpnuke as I do now except I won't use it myself. Sounds like a dichotomy, and maybe it is, but then maybe it isn't. Wink

Captain Joined: Jan 17, 2003 Posts: 629 Location: Europe

I think the moral dillema lies with the Club Members. In principle they pay $100 per year in exchange for the privillege to get the new versions one or two months before the general crowd, while in fact they pay to serve as beta testers. Isn't that weird?

It would be much more "ethical" to allow club members to remove the copyrights, if they want to. Thus the pure spirit of GNU will be preserved, and no commercial edition would be necessary at all. And, I can clearly see it, there will be much more club members listed.