Open source forum?
 

I'm of the opinion that an open source forum would be beneficial to vb.org and forum owners.

1. A lot of really cool modifications are here at vb.org. Unfortunately, many end up no longer being supported after awhile for one reason or another. When that happens, I'd bet that many of the devs would be willing to release the code to the community via the open source forum for further development.

2. I know a lot of people who don't release hacks because they don't want to support them. Supporting a hack is HARD and VERY time consuming. Yet there is a lot of quality code out there that could benefit the masses if it was simply released.

3. Good open source dev can't go on in normal threads.

Obviously this would take some planning to implement. But I sincerely think it could be good for vb.org and forum owners in the long run. I usually don't do "forum requests" as I think it somewhat rude, but you guys have been doing some great work on this site lately so thought i'd give it a shot. To be fully transparent I will say that I'd move a couple of our hacks to the open source forum.

Thank you for your consideration.

If the staff did create a forum for hackers to place their work to be used as open source how many people would actually download the project and expand upon it?

Authors can already release modifications on their terms now. If a coder wants he can release a modification and say it is to be considered Open Source (Assuming it only contains original coding) and that the community is allowed to improve it.

We do have plans to better facilitate modifications released as such in the future, but that will be probably not be before the second half of this year.

Aren't modifications open source by default? :p You mean some kind of Creative Commons licensing label or something? I'd be up for that. Certainly I'm never going to believe that anything I do can't be optimised or improved upon and if it gets people something better or saves me some work, all the better.

Who can say? Since a large amount of people here are coders I'm willing to bet that quite a few simply take your mod, improve/change whatever they feel necessary and use it. In fact I know that often happens. This way they're more likely to hand back their modded version and donate it for general use I assume.

Or come to that, there are endless suggestions and requests from people. You tick the "DIY" box in the mod specifics list and say "Off you go then :)".

Who is willing to take the time to learn how the code works? I would rather code something from scratch then research a hack.

Cool, thanks Marco :)

Yes, I am referring to the licensing you speak of :) A lot of people confuse open source with viewable source. Open source invariably means released with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. As it is right now, you couldn't take a hack I release and improve upon it or use any of the pre-written code.

The open source movement is huge. We wouldn't have anything from linux to Firefox to Wikipedia if people didn't take the time to learn others' code.

For a small modification yes, but in the case of the Zoints SEO modification which was intended to be improved upon by the community, are you really going to start from scratch if you want something of your own rather than fix a bug or two?