Hi all,
Thanks for the comments.
I agree Gizmo, it's unlikely that Groupee will do any additional
development work with UBB.classic. And you're right, there are some
challenges webmasters have to surmount when using UBB.classic if
their forums start getting statistically significant volume.
Allen, reading your comment was like a tactical nuclear bomb
going off in my brain! LOL
At this juncture, Groupee derives no direct economic benefit
from the UBB.classic line of boards -- with two exceptions that
I can think of off the top of my head.
(1) Backlinks
There are thousands of boards still out there that have the
copyright link at the bottom of their forum pointing back to
Groupee (even if it's the old infopop URL, the traffic
eventually makes its way back to the new Groupee homepage).
So in a way, it's a form of free advertising for the company.
(2) Member Area Access/Upgrades
There is a certain percentage of webmasters who for one reason
or another may decide they want to upgrade from UBB.classic to
UBB.threads. The fact that they are running a UBB.classic board
means they're prime prospects to buy member area access so that
they can upgrade/replace their current forum(s).
- - -
Current UBB.classic webmasters could potentially be upset if the
entire project is open sourced, given that they paid for access
to the code in the first place, etc. It could be one reason why
Ted might hesitant to open source the code.
On the flip side, UBB.classic is on very thin ice... According
to the Wikipedia entry for vBulletin (and we know sometimes the
information on there is suspect, but still...) the founders
of vBulletin created vBulletin v1 as a PHP re-write of
UBB.classic... And that was at a time when UBB was in its prime,
and could have easily taken steps to use litigation as a way
to bully the vBulletin founders into abandoning the project...
vBulletin was an easy target, since they were selling their
software, had revenue, and were easy to "locate"...
What I'm trying to say is that UBB.classic is susceptible to
being "cloned" -- and Groupee may not be able to justify the
logistical and legal costs of pursuing a course of protracted
litigation to try and get the "genie back in the bottle" --
especially given the fact that UBB is
and no longer even
officially sold or marketed by Groupee.
My educational background is in law, and I have an extremely
strong respect for intellectual property rights, and am not in
any way suggesting that UBB.classic code should be maliciously
cloned or modified in a way that defeats the letter and spirit
of the license agreement that presently exists.
That said, I do think that Ted and the team at Groupee could
potentially be persuaded to allow a "fork" development path
to go forward in much the same way an operation like CentOS
derived its existence from Red Hat. Actually, I'm not even
sure that CentOS could be considered a fork path, I think
they just re-brand Red Hat's stuff. I'm not sure... but
anyway, you get the idea.
Sadly, but truthfully, if Perl were an in-vogue coding language,
my suspicion is that an "unauthorized" variant of UBB.classic
would be supported and championed in much the same way as phpBB
is today... (but hopefully without the bloat and exploits that
perennially plague phpBB! 
)
That's all for now, sorry for such a long post!
-Nathan
