it was just popular in general but yea the hacker & pirate scene grabed onto it for the source back then you didnt get source to many other bbs softwares & you can be sure there was alot of them that pirated the source to wwiv the irony here is that wwiv is now opensource lol i registered back in the day a whole $80 & im still useing it to this day so i think 15 years of service out of 1 software package is worth $80 dont you? Eli =-)~