There are a lot of reasons why licensing FR wouldn’t work.
Bluntly, the biggest one is that the look and feel of this place is very reassuringly old-fashioned and under the bonnet it’s actually too simple to license out. (I say that as a fan - I like the classic look. Like cars, there’s nowt better than a classic that can be fully maintained with standard tools - from what I see it’s standard HTML and standard JavaScript under THIS hood).
Many of the biggest and longest running talkboards that vaguely resembled this place were mothballed between July 2010 and December 2011 - in fact Salon Table Talk and Guardian Unlimited Talk were mothballed in 2011, within weeks of each other. Two other examples were NYTimes and the BBC talkboards.
For small communities, there are established alternatives for basic forum functionality: phpBB for a real old-school skinnable look, bbPress for Wordpress integration, NodeBB for a more modern look, and so on. If you can re-skin any of them to make them look like this place, you don’t need to license the code from this place.
To sum it up:
1. FR is an exception which proves a rule: almost all the other talkboard sites like this one were already long gone by 2015. I just don’t see the decline of the talkboard concept going into reverse; it’s kept alive by a loyal following with many years of engagement.
2. The MSM now want curated content with limited comment - the idea of end users being able to start their own threads fills them with dread.
3. One reason why so many replacement forums deployed a limited subset of formatting controls e.g. [b] [/b] for bold, and many block inline images, is that doing so reduces the admin effort needed to moderate content for copyright infringements.
4. Standard approaches are needed to cover libellous or illegal content. If the site can’t police the content through automation tools and checks, it relies heavily on manual moderation. That’s one reason why so many talkboards actually ran at a loss - the cost of reactive moderation was high, and so was the cost of batting away legal actions based on unmoderated content.
I don’t think FR could handle what we have here +88 million more!!
DISQUS came along with an inferior platform and now they have hundreds of millions of users.
Similar to when Gary Kildall decided to go futzing around on his airplane instead of taking IBM seriously when they came calling to talk about writing DOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
He toiled away in obscurity while Bill Gates became a multibillionaire.