UseBB Community

Open letter to the community
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With this letter we want to make our part of the facts around the Revo Forum/XennoBB case clear, to our own users but also anyone who has heard about the XennoBB versus Open Source case from other websites or community forums.

"Revo Forum" was a new forum package released around March 2006. The news was posted on a then popular website called "The Forum Insider". It was discovered that Revo Forum contained PunBB code in an illegal way. This news was spread fast, such as on my own personal weblog. Eventually, this maddened the owner, who started the spam attack on our forum and listings on 3rd party websites. As I had received a death threat, a report was filed with the Belgian police against the owner of Revo Forum. This resulted in the temporary close-down of our community forum around March 2006.

Eventually, Revo Forum disappeared shortly after.

Around April 2006, "XennoBB" popped up, made by a developer with the exact same name, and also based on PunBB (although in a legal way, but illegaly containing GPL licensed code from other projects). Although we had agreed with the developer he would "leave us alone", it was discovered later that XennoBB was using copyrighted content of the UseBB website. After an inquiry sent to the owner, the owner made clear that "he did not care", so was his website host unable to do anything about the situation. Up-to today, the content remains on the offender's website.

While this has learnt us yet another time many people can't be trusted, it also changed our view on 3rd party listing sites, websites who maintain a big collection of links and reviews to both free and commercial scripts and resources. After attacks executed on our listings, a request for help to these websites usually (apart from one) resulted in nothing. We want to emphasise the low value of the listings' ratings and reviews found on these websites, as these websites have proven to be very easily abused. Therefore, we have stopped putting efforts in maintaining and creating new of these public listings.

To finish this letter, we would like to thank the people who have supported us in this case and we hope we can let it rest for now. However, we still hope for the "Xenno Group" to remove our copied content, and they owe the UseBB Project, the Open Source community and anyone who has suffered from this matter a public apology.

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Dietrich Moerman
UseBB Project Manager

Update (August 9th 2006)
PS: as it seems the XennoBB community was hacked today, we would like to note the UseBB Team or relatives have no contribution in this at all.

The project was "secure" and highly customizable or so it says here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XennoBB
Looks to me like this Romanian hacker is making his own PR for his software which has borrowed from various boards.

Let me ask a question. Aren't you allowed to "copy" some code from other software if it's licensed under the LGPL?

Even you Dietrich, inside UseBB (I don't remember where) you have some code "borrowed" from phpBB. It says so in the comments. Isn't it legal?

It's legal if you keep the copyright and give credit to the original authors. In XennoBB's case GPL licensed code was used and the original copyright statements were replaced by his own, implying he wrote the code himself.

I knew XennoBB was based on punBB, cos I checked myself, but had no idea it was using part of useBB too...
Also never seen useBB before today, but will go check for sure...

Also I believe punBB have now some credits for XennoBB, or should I said used to as the all thing have been hacked today and all the websites are down... Some hacker had a play a fucked up the all community even tho 90% of members had nothing to do with it... Yet they all paid for it...

I haven't folowed the story from the start but saw the fighting on XennoBB board, I can understand perfectly the trouble of the credits not stated and the no-respect of the law, but on fighter of that said law broke other laws big time by hacking in and destroying the all community...

I am not here to defend XennoBB's developer at all, cos well, I saw the code and the lack of credits, but just to let you know the latest story, which I am sure you were aware already about this all thing...

I have to say I am fairly disappointed with the PHP developer community at the moment, it's sad to see some don't respect credits and some other go and hack each other...

It makes the open-source world quite sad...

Anyway, hopefully all of this will get better

Now I'm going to go and play with useBB (and by play I mean use it not steal code from it... lol)

We're sorry too it turned out this way, it started with a simple post at my blog more than half a year ago.

In the mean time, XennoBB's forum is back up and the owner is again insulting a bunch of people (though he doesn't say a word about the GPL violations (not from PunBB) and stealing of content of our website).

It will probably remain to go on like this until one part stops reacting. In this case this are we, I don't want to put any efforts anymore in this case. The Xenno Group is clearly not willing to resolve anything, instead they make it worse by insulting both Open Source projects and their developers themselves.

So, I'm now closing this topic and I hope I will never have to open one about this case again, it's about time we dedicate some time to our own project.