Redlabour contacted me by PM, insulting me (in German), blaming me to have locked this thread. Frankly, it wasn't me who locked the thread, so he blamed the wrong person.
Redlabour, I told you before not to draw false conclusions nor to assume things you can be certain of. However, it made sense to lock it, as you were about to start flaming. As you run a forum as well, you should know better.
I unlocked this thread again, so you're free to reply. If this should even remotely start to become a flame thread again, I'll finally lock it again. Avoid shouting "bug" or similar. Don't get personal. Play by the rules.
The thread Redlabour refered to (in German) can be found here:
http://www.vbulletin-germany.com/forum/showthread.php?p=145567#post145567 He asks the vb devs for a free development license for bridge development, and another user replies that it would be Coppermine who would benefit from getting a free development license, not vb. The other user says that photopost has bought a license to develop something like a bridge, so coppermine should do so as well. I understand that this is not the official answer from vb, but after all, that's the same attitude I got from VB some time ago when I asked for the license: they said they would never give out such licences, because all interessted coders could buy one. They don't understand open source, that's why competing apps like phpBB are much more successful imo. Photopost might have bought a license, because they need to make money. We don't make money, although it fills me with pride that Coppermine was the first photo gallery app to come up with a bridging system. Other ("competing") products like Menalto or Photopost mimmicked this and adopted the idea long after bridging was a core feature in Coppermine.
The Coppermine devs are not particularly eager to help commercial apps like vb promote their software by providing bridges for them. That's one reason why we don't create bridges for commercial apps. Another reason is that we can't support what we don't know: it's simply impossible to keep all bridges up-to-date when new versions of the bridged apps come out. We
have to rely on user contributions. The coppermine packages contain some bridges out-of-the-box as a courtesy to users. If those users don't understand that
we're doing
them a favor instead of understanding that we don't gain anything from supplying bridge files, we'll have to re-consider providing those bridges at all.