.Text fork, inaccurracy in a few things
Phil Haack has recently announced a fork of .Text called Subtext. I wish him the best of luck, but found a some inaccuracies in his announcing post.
“There is a non-commercial license available, but it requires displaying the telligent logo and restricts usage to non-commercial purposes.”
That is only a half truth. With the non-commercial license, you are required to display the logo somewhere on the page, but you are not restricted to non-commercial purposes. Simply look at the second paragraph of the license:
“Subject to the restrictions below, you may use the Software for any commercial or non-commercial purpose.”
There are restrictions, but they basically consist of the logo being shown and not taking it and calling your own. None of them have anything to do with restricting a business from utilizing the software commercially.
Secondly, his opinion of the targeted market for CS is a little off.
“By virtue of it going commercial, it’s being targeted to a different market than your average hobbyist and blogger.”
It can be difficult to write software that targets both big and small implementations. Look at .Text. Plenty of people had a difficult time getting it installed, regardless of large/small site. Out of the box, CS 1.0 does lean towards a larger, multi-user implementation, but it can be easily changed over to work for single users. CS 1.1 will be even easier, as many of the items that raised issues have been worked out. All you will need to do is create a default blog, drop in a new url config file, and edit the web.config. Might even be able to find a way to do all of that for you.
CS can handle small sites (like mine) all the way to larger ones, like weblogs.asp.net. Much thought and effort is going to be going into getting it easily configurable for either. CS1.1 has been primarily geared towards bug fixes (for performance and stability), but CS1.2 is the one to watch for some new mind blowing things (both glitsy “wow, that’s cool” down to kick ass core mechanics).
I do wish Phil the best of luck and will probably watch his progress, but naturally, my loyalties are with the software I write, and you may tend to correct someone when they are a little wrong.
Hello. Thanks for pointing out the innaccuracies (none intentional) in my announcement. I’ll be sure to update my blog with corrections.
As for the target market, I see your point that I may be slightly off. The point is that by commercializing Community Server, you’ve created an incentive to target the needs of larger paying corporations. Your a business and you need the cash inflow. Nothing wrong with that.
The direction I hope to take Subtext is towards a simpler product for individuals who don’t need Forums, Galleries, etc… and want a blogging engine with no restrictions, whether the restriction is requiring a logo to be displayed or not being allowed to distribute source code.
Best of luck to you and Telligent as well.
ken
6 May 05 at 5:33pm
By the way, your site looks totally awesome? are you going to turn that into a skin for CS?
ken
6 May 05 at 6:09pm