Interview - Matt Mecham of Ibforums

Whenever a new product is released to the market, it has to battle strong competition from existing products in the same market, while proving a competitor for them at the same time. Which script did was Ikonboard's largest competitor, and what other difficulties did you face while launching the first stable release of Ikonboard?

When I released Ikonboard there wasn't a great deal of serious competition, certainly nowhere near the glut of forum scripts that are available today. Board Power and BoardMaster were dying slowly, either through stupid decisions or lack of development (the BoardMaster developer disappeared without a trace). vBulletin was relatively new, not yet out of the version 1.1 releases, YaBB was just starting out, phpBB 1 hadn't been released, and UBB 5 was still the leader of the pack. I never really worry about competition and what other forum software houses are doing, I just concentrate on my own work and try to take it as far as I can.

When Ikonboard was released, some UBB owners claimed that Ikonboard was just a re-badged copy (which obviously it wasn't) and made some noise, which I guess is quite natural as most boards look alike from the front end. In my experience, it's only a small handful of people that try to stir up trouble -- you rarely see the developers getting involved in a tit-for-tat argument; as a matter of fact, I've remained on good terms with the UBB and vBulletin authors and development teams. On paper, UBB was Ikonboard's biggest competitor at the time of its release, even though I didn't really see it as "competition" -- that's not meant in an arrogant way, it's just that I was never trying to compete with UBB because we serviced two different markets.

The biggest difficulty Ikonboard faced -- and Invision Board still faces -- is being taken seriously by the commercial sector, where most people assume that "free" equates to "better than nothing". I've always tried hard to persuade people that this isn't always the case, and that, in fact, 3 of the most used software tools on the Internet are all freely downloadable. Apache, MySQL and PHP are all giants in their field because they're free. It's difficult to imagine PHP being as widely used as it is if you had to pay for a server side license before you could use it. With that in mind, I do find it fairly ironic that the free software that uses these tools isn't allowed to prove itself before it's labeled as "better than nothing". Having said that, over time Ikonboard did carve itself a pretty decent reputation and was used by some rather large Websites, including Sony and Viacom.

What type of license agreement was Ikonboard first released under, and what license agreement is your current script, Ibforums, released under?

Ikonboard and Invision Board both follow the Freeware model using our own proprietary licensing: they've always been available for free but they aren't, and have never been, open source. A lot of people ask us why we don't release Invision Board as open source (GPL), and my answer is always the same: Open source is great, and PHP, MySQL and Apache all prove that the GPL model works. YaBB and phpBB also do well with the open source license, but it's not something that we wish to do. I've released little scripts before and in almost all cases, to most, open source merely means "I can remove the copyright, rename it and release it as my script" which, of course, isn't the case -- I got tired of seeing my work re-badged. To true open source developers this may seem vain and narcissistic, but I always marketed my products with a business approach.

Invision Board is free to download, but you don't have the ability to re-distribute or re-badge the product without our written consent. Of course, you're allowed to change the template colors, the graphics, and make as many modifications to the board as you wish (as long as you don't remove the copyright and link at the bottom of the page). In effect, this allows you to do as much as you can with an open source product apart from re-distribute it with the modifications in place. I'm not looking to make money directly from Invision Board -- that was never the intent -- but we do use it as a way to get traffic to our sites, which offer custom scripting, Web hosting, forum hosting and priority support. That's how we make our money -- that's how we're able to develop a product and allow it to be used for no cost. Most businesses that we've dealt with prefer to use a freeware product because the developer still holds some liability, offering a priority support plan also gives them the confidence that we're not just doing this for kicks. We have a great support team of about 20 core members who do a fantastic job and always receive praise from our clients.

When you released Ikonboard, who was working with you at the time, and what resources did you use?

When Ikonboard was first released, I was working on the code, development and support on my own. I was paying for virtual hosting at my own cost. However, it wasn't long before I started recruiting a team to help support the product and moderate the support board -- it being a new product, we were all in the same boat, had to be quick on our feet and learn fast. We were fortunate to have some talented people working with the Ikonboard team -- our NT specialist Marcel (aka Redmak) went on to work on Neowin.net, but nearly all of the original "iTeam" are still with me today, nearly 2 years later.

When Ikonboard 2 was released, the product had started to gain momentum and we were out-growing our virtual hosting -- especially bandwidth. I was stretching my budget to make the payments but it was obvious that something needed to change to allow us to grow. Fortunately for us, Ventures Online stepped in with a very generous offer of semi-dedicated hosting in return for a banner advertisement to help us grow. When JEG acquired Ikonboard, we moved across to their in-house network. Ikonboard.com sat on a dedicated linux server (an IBM Netfinity) and was plugged into the twin OC48's that powered the network -- needless to say, bandwidth and resources weren't an issue any longer.

Early in 2001, JEG approached and bought Ikonboard. What were the details of that deal?

The Jarvis Entertainment Group (JEG) approached me in the first quarter of 2001. At this time, Ikonboard had been out for several months and had established itself. I'd just started work on Ikonboard 3 and I was aware that trying to manage the development, for administration and the business was too much, considering that I also had full time employment. I spoke with the CEO of JEG on a few occasions before the deal was formalized, and he promised many things such as dedicated hosting in his own datacenter, helping with the administration and business development, and assured me that he didn't want to charge for Ikonboard. He was happy to let it grow and remain free -- after all, a busy Website can get good sponsorship deals, and keeping a good flow of traffic through the network impresses the shareholders.

After much deliberation, I signed the contract and the deal was done, now Ikonboard was owned by JEG and I was brought into JEG to manage the project. I feel that it's worth mentioning here (to put many rumors to rest) that the deal did not involve any money at all. My "payment" was in the form of shares in JEG (which at the time of writing I have not managed to sell or trade as they are virtually worthless). Initially there was a large outcry from the Ikonboard community who feared the worst -- that a large corporation had swallowed us up, and it was only a matter of time before they were charged for downloading Ikonboard -- or that it would be broken up and sold on. It took me a long time and a lot of personal promises to reinforce that this was not going to happen and that Ikonboard would remain free.