[Brad]

Such a shame to see so many people against his work begin released here for free. The entire community would benefit from having these modifications released here (or anywhere).

I'm hoping he decides to release all of this here (or anywhere!) under a license that would allow anyone to modify the source code and re-package it.

I can understand his customers not wanting things to go in this direction because they paid for the software. But at the end of the day they were mostly paying for one-on-one support which is going to come to an end no matter what the author decides, unless he has time continue developing and supporting his software in the future at some point or transfers ownership of the products to another person.

At least they will have a chance of getting support from multiple people in the community if the work is released here. A "paid mod" going free will attract a lot of traffic and many people that didn't have a chance to try the software before will begin to using it. Lets not forget about the guys writting code around here who'll likely be taking a peek at all this new source code and thinking up ways to improve it. There is also the matter of vBulletin upgrades....the current versions of the modifications may stop working at some point in the future when a new version of vBulletin is released. However these modifications are popular enough that someone in the community is bound to port them. If these modifications remain under their current license such ports can not be released to the community....meaning you're stuck doing it yourself or paying someone to do it for you.

As a community we need large projects like this! They should be open and anyone should be free to re-use/re-release the code provided that they have added something unique to it.

I wish The Geek and his family all the best.