My question is: Why should Icy Phoenix rely on phpBB for security fixes or support?
Surely it can be maintained independant of phpBB.
First of all I quote this.
Yes but wouldnt it be easyer if the developer could concentrate on the feature develoment and not on the securtity? I mean i know no reason why they should not update, but if there some reasons for
MG ... its ok
Regarding this I think you are missing a key point.
The major source of security issues in a project comes from external mods. All the past security issues in
phpBB XS and Icy Phoenix was related to some mods coded non properly... so even if phpBB support will continue you are not assured that a modded phpBB 2 board is secure. The same stands for phpBB 3. You can have the latest release installed... but it is enough to have one "badly" coded mod to expose the whole site to security issue.
As I said several time, Icy Phoenix is not a premodded. And it is not relying on standard phpBB 2. Try to compare Icy Phoenix files with original phpBB 2 files... make some tests with common files. And compare as well the mods. You will be surprised how much of that code has been changed or recoded from scratch. That is because Icy Phoenix has many new features: most of them coded from scratch, others ported by "recoded" mods, and finally others ported from phpBB 3.
What I'm trying to say is that if you decide to use Icy Phoenix is because you trust the team here, and you like the feature Icy Phoenix has. If you don't trust the team, and you fear that your site is exposed to security issues just because some old core code is still phpBB 2... well... then it is better to install something else.
It is not a matter of competition: as I stated several time Icy Phoenix is an amatorial project, I'm not a professional, and the Team here is neither vaguely as expert as phpBB Team is. So if you like this project, the best thing you can do is using it and trying to help us in the development.
Porting Icy Phoenix to phpBB 3 right now wouldn't make it more secure than it currently is, not because of phpBB 3, but because of the extra features.