Open-Realty Fork!

Posted on April 11, 2007
Filed Under Design |

Open-Realty forked and yet to be named.

I mentioned, then mentioned it again here and there only to remove the article of my intentions from my site while I did a great deal of research on the legalities of open-source product forks. Having spent a great deal of time figuring this out, here is what I’ve come up with.

Open-Realty falls into a particular type of licensing classes known as open-source licensing but does not expressly use the wording of GNU/GPL. Open-Realty has its own license that permits distribution and alteration under the agreement that original licensing stay in tact and that it remain open-source. After examining my saved chat conversation with the source development leader, Ryan Bonham, a fork is in fact permitted providing we rename and handle support alternatively. Cool! Agreed! so a new forum and a new site will be published prior to release.

Lots of open-source projects get forked. osCommerce has no fewer than 4 that I know of. HTMLEdit was forked, and mega popular Mambo was forked to become the now super successful CMS Joomla.

Although motives vary, my motive for forking open-realty stems in part from disagreements with administrators in the open-realty forums that seem to pride themselves on conduct unlike any admin’s I’ve ever encountered. Respectfully, Ryan has done a good job in the development of Open-Realty and credit will be given where credit is due. So why fork open-realty over something as trivial as a disagreement with armed psychotic (likely alcoholic as well) volunteer forum administrators? As mentioned this is only part of the reason.

Open-Realty owes a great deal of its success to its community, FACT! Ryan’s project, greatly appreciated in its open-source form is great for entry level to medium level Agents and Realtors that want a relatively quick working real estate site without a lot of hassle. My motivation in this fork therefore is largely do to a different perspective on the real estate market. As a template designer for a new IDX solution, the need was to make Open-Realty work in tandem with existing popular solutions. Its always been our argument that a listing manager should be a listing manager only and that other things like page design, news, mortgage calculators and other features should be external components rather than a fully integrated solution. Now Open-Realty is easy to modify to accommodate most of these solutions externally, it was the areas that were not easy to modify as the target of the forks modifications.

To date, the code in this forked version of open-realty has been modified to be lighter, faster, and cleaner as we removed many redundant code segments and incorporated a fixed rather than selective WYSIWYG HTML Editor. Using a commercial editor did however pose some licensing issues that had to be solved in order to keep the whole project out of hot water.

I purchased a commercial developers license for a new WYSIWYG Editor and have hard coded integrated it into this forked version along with 4 new tools that deal with SEO, SEF, Menu Management, and an interactive Google Map feature so often requested. The beauty is that none of these modifications requires the addon system which has had some concerns in the past.

The beautiful thing about selecting open-realty as a jump off point for this project is that the original code (up until 2.3.6 at least) can be used in commercial ventures as outlined by the many posts we saved on the subject according to Ryan Bonham. What this means is that Open-Realty and this fork can be used in commercial projects and services without restraint providing you adhere to the license. This is similar in effect to the Mambo / Joomla solutions we see all over the internet, many times as integrated packages or solutions for commercial purpose.

Templates has always been a strong motivator in selecting a solution and commercial templates will be available that will include the forked version of Open-Realty, (again, not yet named) similar to TemplateMonster templates for CRELoaded, ZenCart, WordPress (on some), and osCommerce. In each of these cases when you purchase a template from TemplateMonster for any of these products the source or core application is integrated as part of the package. This is not entirely by necessity since many templates use un-modified core elements.

With this fork of Open-Realty I fully intend on making available a full inventory of templates that will feature variant modification sections for backwards compatibility with Open-Realty 2.3.6+

As soon as I have more to post on the progress I will do so.

~ Jared Ritchey

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