[Industry News]

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce, effective immediately that MyBB is no longer distributed under our own proprietary license agreement and is now distributed and licensed under the popular open-source GNU GPL v3.

The move to a fully open-source compatible license comes as we want to open MyBB up to the community and help support the world of free software.

For those not familiar with the GNU GPL v3 license, the GNU GPL license still allows you to use MyBB for free. You may also take a copy of MyBB, modify it and redistribute your derivative version as long as the internal copyright notices are left in tact and your derivative is also distributed under the GNU GPL license.

You may read the GNU GPL v3 license agreement MyBB is distributed with at: http://www.mybboard.net/about/license/.

Questions:

• Does this mean I can remove the MyBB 'Powered by' line?
  In short - yes and no. The MyBB 'Powered by' line is no longer a requirement on the bottom of your forums, however if you wish to receive support from the MyBB team, it must be in place on your forum.
  
  The 'Powered by' line is how MyBB promotes itself and we receive the majority of our users, we very much would appreciate it if you left it in place as a sign of respect for the hard work that goes in to this application.
• Which versions of MyBB are GNU GPL v3 licensed?
  MyBB 1.4.2 and onwards will be licensed under the GNU GPL v3. Older releases of MyBB (1.4.1, 1.4, 1.2, 1.0 etc) are still licensed under our proprietary license agreement and still subject to the terms and conditions set forward in that agreement.
• What does this mean for me, the average Joe user?
  To the average Joe, this change does not affect the way you use MyBB or run your forums. You do not need to change anything, you just need to make sure you comply with the terms and conditions set out via the GNU GPL - which if you meet our current license agreement, you already do.

If you have any questions or feedback about the license changes, please use the discussion thread and we'll do our best to answer them.

Regards,
Chris Boulton
MyBB Project Manager

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