Hi guys,
I'm the project manager at NovaBoard, and was just looking at my stats to see where people were coming from etc, and found this thread - glad to see people like it!
The original project developer did indeed like IPB and vB but he clearly stated at the time that it was not a copy in any way, he wrote all of the code himself.
Now trust me when I say this - you will want to watch out for NovaBoard over the next few months, because I can guarantee you we are going to get big, we've got a lot of things in the pipeline, especially since I changed everything to open source!!!
Feel free to contact me for more info.
James