User:AngelinaBelle/SMF team manual/Welcome to Simple Machines

Welcome to the Simple Machines family! As part of the family, there are a few things we'd like you to read and understand . As a new member of the team, we understand you probably don't have much of a clue what you're expected to be doing, so this guide should help you a bit, if you're having trouble speak to a peer or a team leader and they will be glad to help you.

A Brief History of Simple Machines

In the year 2000, a 17-year-old high school student named Zef Hemel wanted to add a forum to a site he was running. But the high-quality solutions (such as Ultimate Bulletin Board) were too expensive for him. Since he had a few months of Perl experience, he decided to build his own. He made the first alpha release on July 4th, 2000, and called it YaBB (Yet another Bulletin Board), free open-source software for anybody to use.

With a free Russian domain name (Yabb.com.ru), a Yabb forum, and a download page, the Yabb community grew quickly. Zef often implemented user-requested featuers daily. Sometimes twice daily. Soon, others were contributing features, and Andy Tomaka, Matt Mecham, and others joined the YaBB core developer team. A separate application, BoardMod (an early predecessor to Package Manager) made it easier to install a growing repository of YaBB modifications. Translators joined the effort and users began holding meet-ups in Italy and the Netherlands.

A year after YaBB's initial release, Zef decided he needed to step back. He was about to start Computer Science studies, and YaBB was too large a time committment. That's when Jeff Lewis took over management of YaBB.

[There were disagreements and several people left the project]

Later, Joseph Fung and Jeff Lewis began a secret PHP port of YaBB: YaBB SE. Zef briefly got involved again. He had been working on a PHP board himself, but contributed several features, including Package Manager, which allowed forum owners to apply modifications to the YaBB SE forum from within YaBB SE.

Our Core Values

The following is a list of precepts and values key to the Simple Machines team. These beliefs and values are critical to the ongoing success of the project and should be embodied in everything we do and every decision we make.

Free Software

We will provide our software to the public for free. A full and complete version of any software title developed by this project will be available to everyone without any cost, be it monetary or otherwise.

Respect and Fairness

We will treat others with consideration, high regard, courtesy and dignity; in a just, equitable and unbiased manner. We will demonstrate good manners, pay attention and treat others as we would like to be treated. We will be consistent, listen and be open to feedback, be careful making judgments about others, and treat people equally and equitably.

Development and Growth

We will support the personal and professional growth of each every member of the team. This project was founded by people and for people looking to development their skills as well as themselves. We will always strive to help and encourage others and to provide opportunity for growth, development and learning.

Recognition and Credit

We will recognize the successes and accomplishments of the team and the individuals who make up this team. We will give credit where credit is due. This applies to successes, contributions, licenses and rewards.

Friendly Competition

We exist in a competitive world, with many other alternative software titles. We will persevere in this arena through quality and respect, not through antagonism and hate. We will support competitors and treat them as we would have them treat us. We will not insult, disparage or in any other way teardown other projects, businesses or organizations.

Peers and Equals

Everyone on this team is an equal. We have structure and process because they allow us to improve communications, responsibility and ability to do what needs to be done - NOT because it infers power. We will make decisions in a democratic manner, and no one team member will hold sway over another.

Volunteers

Everyone on this team is a volunteer and gives what they can of their free time. They each give what they want and/or can, but we must accept that life and family come first. We will be understanding and supportive of each other, and will respect other members when they take breaks from and/or leave the team.

Activity

All team members are registered members of the main community boards. We all strive to be as active as required to fulfill the duties of our role on the team. There is no required level of activity on the boards; however, a long unexplained absence is inconsiderate, causes unnecessary speculation and is cause for replacement.

Support

Our reputation is built by our users. Excellent support is fundamental to this reputation. We will continue to provide support and assistance to the members of the user community. A product has little value if it is not supported, ongoing support is ongoing development are equally important.

Intellectual Property

We are contributing our time and efforts to benefit the project. All code, graphics, algorithms and other work provided by team members are donations to the Simple Machines project. This donation of intellectual property cannot be revoked.

Free and Open Source Software

From time to time, we are asked why Simple Machines software isn't released under a license certified by the Open Source Initiative[1]. The point can be made that Simple Machines software isn't Open Source as described by the OSI. However, on the other hand you can do nearly the same things with our software that you can with an OSI certified project. You can modify the source code, distribute instructions to modify it, you can view the code and suggest improvements to it. However, you may not: • Modify the copyright notice displayed (the same can be said for GPL software.) • You are not allowed to redistribute the forum/software itself, without written permission. These two issues popped up on our radar screen when the project was still called YaBB SE and was released under a GPL license. They were mostly caused by people misunderstanding the terms in that license, but there were also several incidents where people misused the license and basically stole the hard work of our volunteers so they could package it as their own. Obviously, this caused quite the uproar with the dedicated people who make this project possible. So, it was decided that Simple Machines should have its own license that would keep the ideas of Open Source alive but would fully protect the rights of the team as copyright owners. All of this was done in conjunction with a copyright lawyer to guarantee the legality of the Simple Machines License[2] (which is further explained in the section Licensing on Page 17). Sometimes people ask us, “Why do you care that people are redistributing it?” The reason is that although we believe in giving back to the Open Source community, we also believe that the volunteers that make up this project deserve the credit. On top of that, allowing unlimited redistribution encourages project forking and could lead to confusion about what versions are supported. By maintaining and allowing only a single version of each of our products, we can ensure the integrity of the code base while making sure that the quality of each product is maintained. Therefore, you could say that everyone wins from it. Don't forget that redistribution is allowed if you have written permission. For example, SMF is currently distributed through Lycos' 1Click! Service, GoDaddy and Fantastico among others. If you would like to redistribute Simple Machines software, please email us. Simple Machines provides you with software that you can modify and improve as you see fit, but you cannot redistribute the entire modified package unless you have a written permission. You can only distribute the instructions on how to modify the source code. Under no circumstances would you be allowed to alter or delete the copyright, just as you wouldn't be allowed to do that if it was released under GPL. But see our software as Open Source, we have outlined the playing field of what you can and cannot do a bit more clearly.

Simple Machines Web Sites

http://www.simplemachines.org http://www.simplemachinesforum.org http://www.yabbse.org http://dev.simplemachines.org - Description of the different sites & urls - Historically were there more sites? - When should we use which sites? - YaBB SE, foreign language sites, dev site

Legal Business Structure

- details on the business entity, perhaps a scan of the article that was published talking about it

---

1 http://www.opensource.org/ 2 http://www.simplemachines.org/about/license.php