Internet Brands claims against Xenforo - Hardware & Software

For those of you not involved in the forum software wars let me give you a background. Right now this forum is using [url=http://www.vbulletin.com/]vBulletin[/url], the most popular paid forum software (also a personal favorite of mine). Version 3 was highly successful in sales and customer satisfaction, and the development team was stellar. That changed though. A few years ago the company that owned vBulletin was sold to [url=http://www.internetbrands.com/]Internet Brands[/url], which owned a bunch of online communities (and a good number of them ran vBulletin!). IB had a different mindset for the future of vBulletin (version 4), and many of the core developers disagreed with this. Scott, Mike, the Lead developer Kier and a bunch more would be fired or quit over the next year. At present only a few of the original developers remain. To make a long part of this story short, IB pushed the release of vBulletin 4 which was full of bugs, had a steep new pricepoint, everyone was mad, they didn't respond and lost a bunch of customers. Now 2 of the original developers (Kier and Mike) announced their creation of a new forum software called [url=http://xenforo.com/]XenForo[/url]. Most if not all vBulletin customers were impressed, and many announced their plans to switch when it was released. [url=http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?363883-Internet-Brands-claims-against-Xenforo&p=2050616#post2050616]So today, one day before the release of XenForo, IB delivers this:[/url] [quote]Internet Brands today has commenced a lawsuit in the courts of England and Wales against Xenforo, and its founders, Kier, Mike and Ashley. The lawsuit is about these claims: infringement of our copyrighted intellectual property, breach of contract, and unfair business practices. The suit is simple: we claim that Kier, Mike, and Ashley have infringed and violated contracts they signed with us to gain unfair business advantage. As such, Xenforo’s software unfairly stands on the shoulders of more than a decade of development by Jelsoft. Internet Brands owns this intellectual property. In total, we are stunned by the actions of Kier, Mike, and Ashley and believe they must not fully understand the laws of copyrights, contract or business torts. Perhaps Kier and Mike think they have “refactored” enough of the code to skirt copyright law. Our analysis strongly indicates otherwise and we believe anyone skilled in understanding such things will concur. Perhaps they are of the misguided belief that because they created some of the vBulletin code as Jelsoft employees, they somehow have unique claims to that property. If so, that too is wrong. Kier’s and Mike’s work as Jelsoft employees was the exclusive property of their employer, and the former owners of Jelsoft not only paid Kier and Mike well during their employment, Kier was paid a handsome bonus when Internet Brands bought the business, although no such payment was required. If the proverbial shoe were on the other foot and rather than buying vBulletin, Internet Brands had instructed our engineers to essentially copy the software, we would have been law breakers. But Internet Brands chose to play by copyright rules and bought the vBulletin intellectual property. And, in our opinion, no matter how Kier, Mike, and Ashley try to “spin” their actions, they have not. A key test for infringement is a determination as to whether a substantial portion of the underlying work amounts to an expression of the prior work. We believe we will be able to easily show that Xenforo is infringing under this test. We have numerous other claims against Xenforo that we believe are equally strong. We trust that software purchasers understand the risks of infringement of copyright law and act accordingly. We have requested that Kier, Mike and Ashley refrain from selling the software while the issues, inclusive of our infringement claims, are heard in the courts. We intend to pursue our rights broadly and vigorously. We consider Kier and Mike to be talented developers, but ones who potentially fail to grasp the implications of their actions. We imagine that many of you in the community will have questions or concerns and we want to be as open and straightforward with all of you throughout this process as possible; however, since this matter is now being handled by the court system, we may be limited in some regards to what we can discuss. Internet Brands[/quote] tl;dr: "We think you're making a product similar to ours and that's copyright infringement and we're gonna get you!!!" [b]My take:[/b] This is complete BS. They claim that parts of the source code have been copied yet it has not been released. And they spring the day before release? Wow. IB just reached a new level of being greedy assholes.

Fuck Internet Brands. :colbert:

Wow. That's ridiculous. How can you sue against something that hasn't been released yet? I hope IB gets their asses handed to them.

I fucking hate Corporations who think that something similar must be an exact copy of their product so it must be taken down! Fuck, it's called competition and usually the customers reaps the benefits, The ones who deserve it. [editline]02:07PM[/editline] IB, Suck my dick.

There's only so many ways you can code forum software, being the same core developers the coding style is going to look very similar, on that front I don't hold much hope for them. Unless they thought of this from the start and deliberately changed their coding style? Either way, I too hope IB fail at their attempts to stifle competition.

Xenforo plays the free market card, judge has to agree, IB loses.

[quote]forum software wars[/quote] And I thought I was a nerd.

If they violated contracts, it's not Internet Brand's fault. Since information is very limited on this, I can't really come to a accurate conclusion, but if they violated contracts and infringed on Internet Brand intellectual property, Internet Brand is not to blame for protecting their property.

So that's why vb4 sucked dick. Why did they sell in the first place? I thought vb made enough money

$sPost = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['post']); I shall now be sued by IB.