vBulletin is used by this forum and from what I see most others. I did some googling around and saw there are some free open source altrenatives, but none look as nice as vBulletin.
I was wondering why is it so popular. With most other software or content managment people can come up with near clones of software that costs.
I looked at mybb and bbphp and they just look so busy or so ugly. I know they have different themes but is there anything special about vBulletin that makes web owners shell out a fee for it?
Vbulletin licensing is very reasonably priced and the product has solid development behind it. Not so mysterious.
If they had an annual licensing fee, or the initial outlay was above most people’s price point, there would be more incentive for people to put a lot of labour into open-source alternatives that suck less. As it is… why bother?
Generally, people are only able to do this when the commercial software sucks. There are many companies that produce commercial software that puts the open-source alternatives to shame. VBulletin is one example.
It should not be surprising that a group of skilled, competent people who depend on sales of software for their livelihood can produce a better product than a bunch of scattered programmers working for free in their spare time.
On the other hand, there are countless examples of commercial software products obviously written by total incompetents, where the open-source alternative is superior. This is especially the case for niche applications, where there is not enough money in the commercial market to support a large development effort, but there are people with interest in the field who don’t mind working for free.