Free Talk Live

(Note that someone just bumped this thread talking about phpBB, and I started typing the below reply, but by the time I was ready to post it the person above me deleted his/her post...  I would appreciate it if that person restored that post if at all possible.)


I just started using a phpBB-based forum at GraveyardOfTheGods.com, and it seems like phpBB has improved quite a bit since I used it last (version 2.xx), but, due to my recent enlightenment on how copyleft licenses encourage government aggression - I would avoid all of the aforementioned forum software from now on.

As for the rest of the server stack, the Apache and PHP licenses are fairly permissive, but MySQL should definitely be replaced with PostgreSQL (or possibly SQLite for tiny projects), which would eliminate the majority of forum packages out there.  The Linux kernel should also be avoided in favor of something like FreeBSD, but that change should not affect the high-level forum software in any conceivable way.

I was initially able to only find a handful of forum packages that don't violate the Non-Aggression Principle (by which I mean they have a permissive license or are public domain, and they work on top of a permissively-licensed software stack below them): Phorum, the forks of OvBB, and some wacky idea called FruitShow.  There also seem to be many new projects to build forum software with something like Django [2] or Grails [2].

And, needless to say, one can always proclaim that Web interfaces are for noobs and just run an NNTP server instead. 

They need to rethink the way they rank things. WordPress is much closer to a CMS these days.