IB have just announced their plans to sue XenForo.

In their own words they have stated

Internet Brands today has commenced a lawsuit in the courts of England and Wales against Xenforo, and its founders, Kier, Mike and Ashley. The lawsuit is about these claims: infringement of our copyrighted intellectual property, breach of contract, and unfair business practices.
The suit is simple: we claim that Kier, Mike, and Ashley have infringed and violated contracts they signed with us to gain unfair business advantage. As such, Xenforo’s software unfairly stands on the shoulders of more than a decade of development by Jelsoft. Internet Brands owns this intellectual property.

Which has caused outrage and screams of “I Knew it” from the XenForo Community.

There is an active discussion on xenforo.com about this right now which users both wishing Kier and Mike all the best and also pledging their allegiance to purchase XenForo and help them fight the claims.

Mostly though it seems that people have just lost even more hope in Internet Brands themselves. Comments like these from feldon23

So Internet Brands completely destroyed the vBulletin product, destroying all customer faith in the product, destroying their own chance at profitability going forward, and in the process drove off its best developers. Not satisfied with this degree of failure, they have decided to compound their colossal screwup by filing a lawsuit against a competing product.

Any good will that Internet Brands may have gained back with the vBulletin community in the last few months by FINALLY delivering a somewhat usable product with vBulletin 4.0.6, 4.0.7, etc. after months of sidestepping and promises, you have just torpedoed all credibility with the entire forum community.

By the way, this announcement sounds chillingly like the SCO copyright infringement lawsuit against Linux. How well did that go?

Say it all.

Either way, all of us here at xenAddicts wish Mike, Kier and Ashley all the best with their claims and hope whole heartedly that this doesn’t effect their brilliant works.