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For a couple of years, I'd been running an active forum for my Open Source projects. Years back, I'd chosen simple machines forum (better known simply as SMF), because of its features and the fast development progress it had back in 2005, prior to its first official release.

SMF was free, but not Open Source. It was kept under a proprietary license that disallowed the distribution of modified versions of the software. For me, this was never a problem, because I had no intention to distribute anything and local modifications (for your own use) were not prohibited. With the release of SMF 2.0, this has changed and SMF is now licensed under the modified BSD license, so it is as free as a piece of open source software can be.

In the last two years, some not so nice things happened at SMF. I do not want to go into detail here and, to be honest, I cannot, because I do not have enough knowledge, but everyone who was frequently following the SMF community probably knows that some things weren't always quite right over there.  In short, there was a lot of fighting and arguing over mostly political and legal things, that's all I know.

However, from a developer's point of view, these issues are now settled. The code is out, it's open source and this is really all that matters for me. So I decided to play around with and create something new from it, adding a couple of new features, fixing a few annoying issues and - most importantly - giving the software a new, fresh and modern theme.

This has just started. Really, it's just about 2 weeks old, and it is really far, far, far from being a usable product, but it's a start.

If you are interested, you can follow it here.