Proposal: The vBulletin.org Commercial Services and Addons Directory.

[Corriewf]

Originally Posted by Wayne Luke

Clarify some things here:

1) There is no liability. We will not be hosting these commercial addons on this site. The links will be links to the Author's webpage. There is no more liability for a dead link than there is for Google or Yahoo having dead links in their directory.

2) Fees will be available on a monthly and yearly basis. The exact fees haven't been determined yet. All income earned will go to benefit this site, either for additional software needed over the long term or to support the staff.

3) There is no proof that commercial software will eliminate free of charge addons. In fact software markets suggest the exact opposite is happening in the world. Commercial Offerings are becoming scarcer as companies merge or drop products while free of charge software is becoming more prevalent. This is not a trend but something that can be traced over the last 20 years. There is a place for both, even addons in both commercial and free of charge that do the same thing by different authors. Look at phpBB. It is successful and was originally released after vBulletin. Not to mention other free forum systems out there.

And this resets the comments.

Thank you for resetting as I was wanting to reply .

I think its a good idea to charge as that will make sure those listing are kept up to date by the authors. Who would pay to have a dead link listed. Good idea!

The only reason I said anything is that I like this site and dont want anything to happen to it because of something stupid.

The problem with the google analogy is that its a little off. Now lets say that you paid google some money for google earth software. Then you went to google's site and they had a listing of really cool add ons that you could buy. So you decide to buy an add on and something goes wrong. Now things go wrong all the time and normally its because instructions are not followed correctly. Anyway, you buy this add on for your google software and it totally crashs the software you bought from google. No matter what you do, you cant get the software from google to work anymore and their tech support just refers you to the owner of the add on. Well I can tell you that someone somewhere is gonna consult a lawyer about the software they paid and normally when someone decides to sue they go after all parties involved. Being that there are people that are making money off their sites using this software even increases this possibility.

Now the situation here is a little different as this is considered a third party site from Jelsoft, HOWEVER, this directory listing system is being implemented at least in principal by Vbulletin employees. That makes the above more applicable.

If you all get together with your lawyer(s) and just make sure that the warning given to the user previous to use is ironclad then I dont see there being any problems of liability. That is exactly what I would do. I keep a lawyer on staff just for ths kind of stuff.