#BeWelcome is a strictly not-for-profit, volunteer-run fork of the popular #CouchSurfing hospitality network. Here is th #FreeCode software they use to run their site.
https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox
Personal view on the history of hospitality exchange networks, like 1200 characters
@strypey Yeah, I was there at the time... when CS announced that they'd go as a for profit it was a big deal, I think was 7 years ago, or 8. The Terms of service became unbearable for any ethical-minded person, the tracking and usage of the users data got even shittier, if possible.
BeWelcome did not fork from CS, software wise or spirit wise, it forked hospitalityclub.org, and that was long before CS became closed-sourced and for profit. It had a massive surge of people migrating there after CS closing the code though, me myself didn't know about BW before the CS mayhem.
You can read about the history of BeVolunteer, the guys behind BeWelcome, here: http://www.bevolunteer.org/about-bevolunteer/history/
Personally, as much as I like the people behind bewelcome, I find the software too bloated, complicated and heavy.
My favorite hospitality exchange network is trustroots.org, created by the people behind hitchwiki like 3 years ago (or 4?). I love the community and the software there, some devs from bewelcome like mikael are now more into trustroots, afaik. Check that out =)
A lot of love and respect for all people in the FOSS community anyway <3
Personal view on the history of hospitality exchange networks, like 1200 characters
@arteteco OK, thanks for the insights. I was introduced to BW by a family that stayed with us using CS, so the version of events I laid out was from them. Apologies if I mislead anyone. Thanks for the links to #TrustRoots, I'll check it out.
Personal view on the history of hospitality exchange networks, like 1200 characters
@strypey mmhm, I remember that users and volunteers were helping the website code, so I thought it was foss, but I guess it may have mislead me as I don't remember a repo or anything like that... yeah, could very well be that it was closed source all the way, I apologise for the mistake. The whole deal was about profit - no-profit
@arteteco BeWelcome was created by a group of people who left CouchSurfing due to some concerns about its structure and business model. That's what I mean by "fork". Sorry for any confusion caused. I don't know anything about the BW stack, or whether any of it was derived from the stack used by CS.