According to Wikipedia, the creators of vBulletin were willing to sell the rights to the product in 1999, but Infopop refused.
I was wondering, do you think this was a big mistake? Today, vBulletin is the most used forum software, unfortunately. Had Infopop purchased vBulletin, we would still have the prestige that we once had. Infopop had refused to rewrite UBB.classic in PHP. In 2001, Infopop bought out WWWThreads, and renamed the product UBB.threads. Prior to Infopop's purchase, there was both a PHP and a Perl version of WWWThreads, but since Infopop already had a forum solution written in Perl, the Perl version of WWWThreads was discontinued. For several years, UBB.classic and UBB.threads co-existed, but soon Infopop (now Groupee) realized that the products were internal competition. Despite UBB.threads being the more robust of the two forum software, sales of UBB.classic continued to cannibalize UBB.threads sales. With the majority of competing forum software now written in PHP and using a MySQL database, it made sense to discontinue UBB.classic rather than UBB.threads.
I am pretty sure that if Infopop had bought out vBulletin, the UBB name would still carry the prestige that it used to.
