When vBulletin becomes fully commercialized
 

When vBulletin becomes fully commercialized

It will mark the end of a great product.

While I realize that I am just a drop in a bucket, I have complete confidence that commercializing modifications on vb.org will mark the beginning of the end for a great product.

Although vBulletin is currently a leader in bulletin board technology, there are others not so far behind. The biggest appeal which prompted me to purchase and pay for vBulletin was entirely wrapped around this community and the open source style modifications it offered.

Although some people seem to think that mods will still come in free flavors afterwards, believe me that selling them will be the ultimate goal for every coder. The results will be the junk mods would be available and the useful ones will all fall under the eminent fee structure.

When this happens users will drop vBulletin in favor of alternate software’s who still support open source modification communities. It's a step backwards for vBulletin as a whole because it will stimulate focus on alternate products and we all know how easily things can change in this industry.

It's a shame to say the least that vb.org has taken this path.
This place was the reason I purchased a vBulletin license to begin with.

PS. I looked for another place to voice this but the topic was closed :surprised:

Let me clarify 1 thing vBulletin.org is a place for free modifications, that is how it is now, and that is how it will stay. We will not be hosting any commercial modifications here.

As a small "gesture" towards those who have commercial products, we will in our current plans however implement a link directory, where authors can rent advertising space for their commercial work. The exact requirements to get listed and how we will implement this are not known yet.

I don't think you need to worry that all coders will become commercial. I have no intention at this point of selling my mods. I have moved to a premium support model because of my time limitations, but if I write code, I generally share it for free. I don't plan on changing this. I will still share my code with my fellow coders here because that's part of the fun of writing the code.

Amy

I don't charge for any of mine and never will - they are not 'big' enough to make that a viable option - nor do I have the time to provide commercial level support.

:hurt:

Let the market bare what it will. I have no problem purchasing quality add-ons to vBulletin if they are worth the value. In the last week, I've purchased add-ons from vbSEO and The Geek without so much as a nanosecond of regret. IMHO, what I got was worth what I paid and was a hell of a lot easier than trying to develop it on my own.

Hacks are okay, but I like to have the option of going commercial for features that I consider critical.

No, what everyone is going to be getting from there on out is a "lite version" of a hack, and telling pepole to upgrade to a full version for "x amount" to enable all the features

You pay for vBulletin. You don't pay for people to spend their time developing something for free and this site has never worked in an OpenSource way. There is a difference between OpenSource and VisibleSource.

Small hacks are released here by alot of coders who have larger commercial products. The reason I chose to go commercial with P3tz was because of the overwhelming amount of vb.org users who wanted immediate support for a free product. Alot of my time was wasted repeating the same stuff because a member "can't be bothered" to read through an X page thread.

You can't take, take, take. People say "well if it was good I'd donate". That isn't what happened for the 3 years I was here before P3tz.

We're not stupid. Good quality free hacks need to be released in order to drive business to this site, so we can sell our paid hacks. Not every hack is worth selling commercially, too. Plus, the higher support standards and the entry fee imposed by vb.org on paid hacks will likely be enough to keep most hacks out of the paid directory.

No one is implying anyone is stupid, hambil. :) As for the Paid Directory, are you implying that there will be a fee of some sort? Going one step further does this mean that vB.org is going commercial too?

Where I'm going with this I don't know...