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.

2 thoughts on “MyBB license changes from GPL to the BSD-3 license with MyBB 2.0”

  1. Hi,

    Relating to the last point in the license “The original copyright must be retained.”, this is the copyright in the source code, not the visible copyright on the forum. The current procedure for the visible forum copyright will stay the same for MyBB 2.0.

  2. Thank you for the clarification Euan! So we will still be able to use MyBB 2.0 without a visible copyright at the bottom without violating the license.

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