Simple Machine Forums has been used by HughesJR.com for quite some time.

Joomla has now been advised by legal counsel that they should inform 3rd party Developers that most extensions produced that are not released under the GPL are in violation of the GPL license requirements which Joomla is released under.

Because of this, the bridge that I have been using to allow SMF and Joomla to use the same usernames has been discontinued.

SMF bridge for Joomla discontinued

There is a lot of controversy surrounding this position by Joomla, but they really have no choice as the Free Software Foundation agrees with the legal counsel that Joomla initially received. Lots of people want to make this about Joomla, but the problem really is with the licensing of SMF. SMF chooses to license their product in a manner that is not recognized by the OSI as open source approved.

While I could have continued to use the current bridge I had installed or I could have bridged the two items (Joomla and SMF) myself, I instead choose use GPL licensed forum software at HughesJR.com. I choose this course of action because I am a member of the CentOS Project and I believe strongly in open source as defined by the OSI.

I don't make this decision lightly, as I really like the SMF software. However, I think that rather than looking for a way around the rules, I should instead support the Joomla developers. If SMF is ever released as GPL, I will use it again in a heartbeat ... but since that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

All this leads up to the GPL software that I picked to use on HughesJR.com. That software is Fireboard. I chose it because it is integrated with joomla and it is GPL. Running a close second was phpBB. If there existed a good bridge that was GPL between phpbb3 and joomla1.5 I probably would have picked phpBB. Since there is not, Fireboard it is.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes