Hi Lars,

Sorry about the late reply on this. We have been asked this a lot, and I think the main reason has been mentioned many times. We are aiming to build an integrated set of products, something no other company can offer. You can go to a cgi directory and pick a good email system, a good directory, and a good forum, but when you try to put it all together and your users end up logging into three different places, it turns into a mess.

What we hope to offer very soon, is the final tie in that integrates the user authentication all together. Currently products share the same code base, same plugin system, same installer, same template system, same sql engine, etc. With Gossamer Community, we will give people the ability to tie the user database together with all our products (and have a flexible api for others to use it too).

I hope this helps, and if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.