Also, keep in mind that E14N uses US based cloud service providers. So even if E14N itself didn’t received such orders, or didn’t comply because they’re Canadian and not American (although as a US citizen, I think Evan would have to comply, IANAL however), E14N’s provider certainly would have complied.

That’s part of the problem. Unless you run your own services, it is actually impossible to know if the government has your data. Providers must not reveal that they have received such orders.

Others mentioning legacy silos and alternatives in response to current news?

I did note the CLA, but you’re right about that and many other differences. I did not know that Vanilla is effectively already a “WordPress of forums”, though I do know that I’m ignorant about forums and they’re an important part of the web; I guess self-education is one of the reasons I found Discourse’s announcement interesting.

Two concerns I have.

* You link to “INSTALL.md” but that now 404s for me. Is that intended to be a 404? Perhaps https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/VAGRANT.md or https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/DEVELOPER-ADVANCED.md are a better link (or you can embed an old git version ID into your link).

* The project seems to use a flavor of copyright assignment (well, asymmetric licensing): “Read & sign the Electronic Discourse Forums Contribution License Agreement, to confirm you’ve read and acknowledged the legal aspects of your contributions” in the README goes to a Google Spreadsheets form where you permit the Discourse company permission to make “proprietary” downstream versions. That’s not the end of the world, but I believe WordPress does not require it, so it’s a difference worth noting.

Additionally, the fact that it’s Rails means it will approximately never be as easy to host as WordPress. Another difference is that WordPress started out as a fork of an existing project (b2), and that WordPress’s competitive landscape was very different, with (proprietary) Movable Type being the main competitor. Vanilla Forums, http://vanillaforums.org/, is an actively-maintained free software, widely-used project. One “meta” difference is that WordPress started out as a clone and slight improvement of existing tools, and gained funding slowly, whereas Discourse follows a more Silicon Valley-esque strategy of promising big and getting substantial funding initially, from what I can tell.

Anyone who wants a supported, free software forum with a large community of maintainers, users, and plugin authors, and supported by a company (that has even raised money in angel-investment style, and perhaps VC style?) can turn to Vanilla today. In that regard, I suppose Vanilla already is the WordPress of forums.

This isn’t meant to be me arguing Vanilla is “better” than Discourse; just mentioning it to provide context to the post. Thank you for the news and information about Discourse!