I need info for the following software

For a forum, Invision and vBulletin are the top scripts IMO.

Use php bb, it's free and good.

I keep hearing horror stories about this script.
Pay a few dollars for a board script and save yourselve some trouble.

> i need a forum software (are there any open source ones that i can use for profit?)

Generally speaking, "open source" almost always means that
you can use it any way you want, for profit, for loss, or for no reason at all.
PhpBB2 is, I believe, licensed under the most common
open source license, the GPL, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, except that you aren't
allowed to hijack a GPL program and copyright it.

PhpBB is fairly new, as these things go, and there were some buggy
versions put out. I understand that current versions are pretty good.
I haven't seen any problems with the ones I've installed or tweaked.
My webmasters are normally pretty good about letting me know
when they have problems. PhpBB2 seems to be a definite improvement
over the first major version.

Personally, I much prefer the wwwboard based scripts.
Not necesarily the orginal wwwboard, mind you, but that format
and the simpler, cleaner design.
That's what I've mainly been installing for the last 6 years or so
and wheneever soemone wants a new feature added I
integrate it with my master source.
Teh original wwwboard.pl is something like 400 lines of code.
I've added about 1,200 lines of additional features, such as the ability
to upload multiple pics to be included in your post.
I sometimes refer to my vversion as Maxboard.

There is also and nms wwwboard look-a-like that is coded much more robustly.
Lately I've been adding some of the same features to it that
I have included in Maxboard.

Of course VBulletin has become something of a standard,
mostly because of it's useless feature bloat, er, I mean cute features.
If you want a board that works like VBulletin and you don't mind
the problems inherent with PHP, I don't see much reason to
choose over PhpBB2, except to pay the nice
programmers that wrote VBulletin.
Actually, scratch that, we open source programmers
will gladly take your money too, if that's what you want to do.

www.ratemyscript.com