MyBB is NOT a community driven project

Recent activities in the MyBB community showed off, that MyBB is not a community driven project. The community is allowed to post suggestions for MyBB 2.0 but the developers are making the major decisions about the future of MyBB without asking the community.

Turns out that MyBB 2.0 will be developed with Laravel 5 and does use Twig as the template engine. The requirements are PHP 5.4 and MySQL 5 or postgresql.

The framework and template engine of MyBB are huge decisions as they have a major influence on the compatible third party components. You could easily integrate a content management system like Pimcore, if MyBB would use the Zend framework. Or integrate a picture gallery built with the Symfony MediaBundle with MyBB 2.0.
Of course this is still possible but it’ll require more effort for the integrating developers.

Especially plugin and theme developers will have to learn the Laravel framework and the twig template engine if they want to continue contributing to the MyBB world. If they decide against the chosen framework, they’ll soon be gone.

You’d have thought that there would’ve been a poll or a public discussion about such huge decisions but there have been none. MyBB development team member Euan T stated that two developers chose the framework when they started working on MyBB 2.0.
While he agrees that the community could have been more involved into the progress, he also states that the developers have no interest in writing blog posts and explaining major development decisions to the community:

MyBB 2.0 development

A few days ago another major decision has been taken by the MyBB development team without discussion with the community – they’ll switch the license for MyBB 2.0.

You can see that MyBB as open source software is not driven by the community but only supported by the community. Community members are allowed to find bugs and post suggestions but they have nearly no influence on the future of MyBB.

If you are using MyBB for business, you should be aware that major decisions will be taken without asking of informing the community at an early stage.

MyBB 1.6 will reach End of Lifetime September 2015

The MyBB development team announced that they will be concluding maintenance and support for the MyBB 1.6 series at the 1st of September, 2015. MyBB 1.8 will be released for one year by that date and MyBB 1.6 will no longer get maintenance or security updates.

There is no LTS release for MyBB.

If you are still using MyBB 1.6 you should update your forum software, plugins and theme to MyBB 1.8 as soon as possible. If you need support with the plugin update check out this tutorial.

MyBB 1.8 comes with nice features to support your MyBB business too, so hurry!

MyBB license changes from GPL to the BSD-3 license with MyBB 2.0

Yesterday MyBB development team member Euan T announced a license change for MyBB 2.0. MyBB 2.0 will no longer be released under the Lesser GNU Public License Version 3 (LGPL3) like MyBB 1.8 but instead be released under the BSD 3 Clause (BSD-3) license.

The license is still open source and will probably allow MyBB to be used even more often, however there are the following limitations:

  • You cannot use the MyBB Group trademark or the names, trademarks or logos of any of the project’s contributors.
  • The MyBB Group cannot be held liable for any damages caused by the software.
  • The original copyright must be retained.

The last point is not clearly defined by the developers yet. For MyBB 1.6 and MyBB 1.8, users were allowed to remove the visible copyright with the backlink to MyBB.com. But if they did, they did not get support in the MyBB.com community forums.

I don’t think that this will change with the usage of the BSD-3 license, but you should be aware of the new license situation and check if there are any issues using MyBB for your business under the new license.