SMF down the toilet?

[Ryan]

As a demonstration of how not to run a software project, go check out http://www.smf-friends.org/

That forum is filled with highly pissed off SMF developers fuming over something that went down yesterday behind closed doors. There appears to be some sort of coup going on. I'm trying to find out the details right now.

As the owner of two SMF forums, this is quite disturbing. I was aware that the management over there had become a total disaster, but I didn't realise quite how bad it would become until seeing so many of their core contributors posting in that forum.

Of course, if the software was GPL they could just fork it ... but it's not :(

[Len]

Wow. I know a few people who use SMF. I wonder if they know about this? I guess I'm off to SMF-land to do some snooping around. ;)

[Len]

Of course, if the software was GPL they could just fork it ... but it's not :(

I don't know a thing about their licensing but I see a lot of talk about forking in that forum.

[conorp]

I'm confused, What happened?

[conorp]

From what I can gather, the main developer has decided to do something that the whole community doesn't agree to.

[Ryan]

From what I can gather, the main developer has decided to do something that the whole community doesn't agree to.

I assume it was the owner, as opposed to the developers. The developers appear to be jumping ship.

From what I can tell, it has something to do with licensing issues. Developers wanted it to change to BSD, but the powers that be said no. I think there were a few other things going, but I haven't managed to found out what yet. There is a forum post being written up right now (for smf-friends.com) which includes more information about what is happening/happened.

[Len]

There is a forum post being written up right now (for smf-friends.com)

Is smf-friends.com (as opposed to .org) a typo or is this yet another site associated with this coup?

Out of curiosity, I've been reading the General Discussion board over there. Is this the only board or do they have hidden boards? (I didn't join to find out)

[Ryan]

Is smf-friends.com (as opposed to .org) a typo or is this yet another site associated with this coup?

Just a typo. I'll fix it in a minute.

Out of curiosity, I've been reading the General Discussion board over there. Is this the only board or do they have hidden boards? (I didn't join to find out)

I registered and haven't seen any other boards.

[samh]

I hope not after all the work we put in to get the wpmu bridge sorted! took us long enough to finally decide on SMF!

[Jeffro]

I spent some time reading through the threads and from what I gather, some sort of vote regarding the future of the project took place and I think it had to do with team structure or some other important aspect of the project. Instead of the votes being recognized, the higher ups went against the poll and made up their own minds which seems to have pissed everyone else off to the point of talking about forking the project. Based on what I read, just about all the core devs for the project have left leaving three of the core people. There seems to have been a bunch of personal issues inside the inner workings of the project from the top down with talks of manipulation and such.

It would seem that there might be a fork of SMF but I haven't seen if that will be the case or not. However, it looks like the project is in shambles and the core people surrounding the project have up and left. There is no mention of anything official on the SMF forums but this would cause me great concern if this forum was powered by SMF.