IPB

Short for 'Invision Power Board', which, as of writing, has recently leveled out it's version to 2.0.3.

Invision Power Board, or IPB, was created originally with the acronym IBF, and was then renamed to IPB later on. The first releases of IPB started at 1.0, and later on versions 1.1, 1.2, and then 1.3 appeared, before the step up to 2.0.

With the release of 1.3.1, the license was changed so that 'continued usage' of IPB required the purchase of a licence, and that it was a 'trial only'. However, the software included practically no limitations or lack of functionality on the trial (except for support), and the lack of specifications on 'continued usage' meant the 'trial' was vastly used for production use.

Shortly after the release of IPB 2.0, IPS closed their forums for a few hours, and, after reopening, the trial was no longer available for download. In an attempt to cover all evidence of their previous promise that there would always be a free version of IPB available, they wiped the off-topic forums and silently edited old announcements regarding 1.0 and 1.1.

These changes brought a semi-riot for a while, and IPS shortly after released a Zend encoded version of the trial with built-in limits, as a replacement for the original trial. IPS had previously discontinued support for those without a licence, and so exists the infamous 'We do not offer support for IPB nor allow it on our forums' message;
Hello,


Please note that Invision Power Board is a commercial product and as such, you must purchase a license to use the software permanently and/or obtain technical assistance. You may find more benefits to purchasing a license here.

If you are an existing customer, please log into your client center and follow the instructions for upgrading your IPS forums account, found at the bottom of the first page you see.

We look forward to helping you!
by Snuffkin February 04, 2005
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Apache

A popular, free, and open-source webserver with massive supporting community and used by the vast majority of websites in the world.

Much more desirable when compared to IIS, due to it's vastly better security history and better dependability.
That website is down. Oh, wait, it's running on IIS.
by Snuffkin February 04, 2005
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.NET

Technology that at a quick glance would appear to be heavily taken from Java. It boasts, however, the ability to compile one program from source written in multiple languages (the primary choices being C#, Visual Basic and C++).

The fact that .NET is tightly bound to Windows somewhat lessens the practicality of .NET when compared to Java.

Like Java has Java Servlet Pages, .NET employs ASP.NET as it's server technology, which might be more attractive were it not tied down to both Windows and IIS, which has a less than desirable security history, when compared to Apache.
I have to download 23MB just to run 'Hello, World'?
by Snuffkin February 04, 2005
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