Phil Haack, who has helped out quite a bit with developing RSS Bandit, recently posted on a new project he is starting in his post Announcing Subtext, A Fork Of .TEXT For Your Blogging Pleasure. Phil writes
What is .TEXT?
.TEXT is a popular (among .NET loving geeks), scalable, and feature rich blogging engine started by
Scott Watermasysk
and released as an open source project under a
BSD license
. Scott did a wonderful job with .TEXT as evidenced by its widespread use among bloggers and being the blogging engine for
http://blogs.msdn.com/
among others.
Sounds great. So why fork it?
There are several reasons I think a fork is waranted.
.TEXT is dead as an open source product.
.TEXT is dead as a BSD licensed open source project. Out of its ashes has risen
Community Server
which integrates a new version of the .TEXT source code with Forums and Photo Galleries. Community Server is now a
product being sold
by
Telligent Systems
. There is a non-commercial license available, but it requires displaying the telligent logo and restricts usage to non-commercial purposes. I'd prefer to use a blogging engine with an
OSI approved license
, in particular the
BSD license
works well for me.
I wish Phil luck with his new project. While on IM with Phil I mentioned that my experience with Open Source projects is that things work best when you have working code before announcing your project. In a recent post entitled Finding Discord in Harmony Charles Miller pointed that working code attracts people who want to code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding. I have found this to be very true. Another thing I pointed out was that he shouldn't be fooled by offers for help. With RSS Bandit, for every 100 or so people who offers to help, there are about 10 or so who come through with actual code then of those maybe 1 person who comes through with a substantial change.
I'm also glad to see that the .TEXT codebase isn't going to die. I've used Community Server briefly and I disliked it quite a bit. The main reason I stopped updating http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo is because they switched the site from .TEXT to Community Server which led to a number of small annoyances that piled up. The annoyances ranged from removing the login link from the blog page to sporting Atom 0.3 feeds which I've mentioned before is a sign of incompetence.
Competition is always good for users.