I would like to respond to a few items in this thread:
"Comms has been the biggest failing of the core project management."
I think everyone, including the core team would agree that communications has been, and continues to be a challenge. This is not unique to DotNetNuke and is one of the issues faced by many Open Source projects. We constantly work on this, but in the absence of a way to bring in dedicated resources to handle this aspect of the project it will remain an area of challenge for us in the near future. I would hope that people have seen some improvement over the last 2 years, but it is certainly no where near where it needs to be. We working to change this but know that we still have a ways to go.
"To me DNN now has enough of a following and reputation that it should able to apply some business model which would allow it to take on enough top notch staff to meet or exceed expectations."
While it is true that DNN has a good following, that does not always translate directly into revenue at a level that is able to meet all of the needs of a project of this size. As anyone who has ever started a company can tell you it is not always easy finding the right business model. DotNetNuke Corp. has been focused for the last two years on putting a business model in place that can sustain the project and we believe we are close to achieving this, however, the proof is in the pudding. Like all businesses, we put a plan in place and must be willing to change if we find that our original plan is not succeeding. We have had to reset our expectations a few times over the last couple of years, but feel that with the help of some good advisors that we are finally on the right track to a sustainable business.
"Even in this small and presumably not fully representative screen shot I can see little improvement from the "Blue Skin"."
All I can say is that everyone is entitled to their opinion. By it's very nature, design is a subjective exercise. What is deemed cutting edge today is stale by next week. What works well in the corporate environment is frowned upon in the Web 2.0 Silicon Valley world. The DNN team did a lot of research, scouring hundreds of sites and skins, and worked with the designers on our team before settling on a final design. These designers have created hundreds of skins for DotNetNuke many of which are top sellers on SnowCovered and the DotNetnuke Marketplace. Because DNN is used in many different environments, we tried to find a design that was a little cleaner and more modern without being over the top. One of the greatest benefits of the new skin is not necessarily the look (although I personally love the new look), but the html underneath. This skin is fully XHTML compliant and uses minimal markup. Most of the look is achieved using CSS. This provides not only a nice look to the initial DotNetNuke install, but also provides a great learning opportunity for new designers trying to figure out how to make modern, XHTML and WCAG/Section 508 compliant DNN skins. The skin must balance our marketing needs, training needs, and yet still be very functional. I think this skin does that. Some people may not like the new skin, but the great news is that there are thousands of alternatives available - so pick one that you do like.
"In the past year, Alfresco has become a serious enterprise player with a large number of large scale, corporate accounts under their belt."
I agree, Alfresco has become a serious player in the Enterprise space. With more than $20 Million in Venture Capital that was bound to happen. However, compare what is happening on the community side and you will see very little happening with Alfresco. Alfresco is a commercial project that releases source code. Joomla is just the opposite. They have a very vibrant community that fully supports the open source model. Unfortunately, recent decisions by the Joomla team have killed off many third party vendors or put those vendors at serious legal risk if they continue to build Joomla add-ons. I personally would not trade one bit of success if it meant that we had to kill the commercial ecosystem or that we killed off the open source side of the community.
"A lot of people have a lot more on the line than the members of the Corp do."
This is insulting on every level. Every member of DNN Corp has taken substantial reductions in pay and put up significant personal capital to get DNN to where it is today. If DotNetNuke were to fail, many of us would be financially ruined. Not only have we made significant financial investments, but we have invested huge amounts of our time as well, even before there was a corporation. This means working through holidays and weekends and generally taking time away from our families to do everything we can to help DotNetNuke succeed. In the process we have made it possible for many other individuals and businesses to succeed as well. We long ago "burned the boats" and have nowhere left to go but forward to success. We do not regret the decisions we made to get DotNetNuke and DotNetNuke Corp off the ground, but I completely reject the notion that we don't have anything "on the line" or that we are not fully committed to DotNetNuke.
"I think there needs to be a drastic overhaul of how the corp runs themselves." "
I do think that the Corp has lost focus on what originally made DotNetNuke great and that will be obvious when 5.0 comes out."
Given that few people in the forums truly knows how the "Corp." runs themselves, this is a little condescending. We would certainly have much more time to focus on the truly important things if we weren't spending time jumping through hoops and doing damage control because members of the community didn't follow basic security etiquette. We could even hire more resources to work on the project or handle some marketing tasks if we weren't spending 10's of thousands of dollars in legal fees and countless man hours to try and protect our DotNetNuke and DNN trademarks. The fact that DotNetNuke Corp. has to spend time dealing with book publishers over advertisements because members of the community refuse to provide proper trademark attribution is ridiculous. Every member of the Corp. and the core team would much rather be spending time working on the product rather than dealing with those issues, but the reality is that these issues have consumed far more time and energy than most people know.
Just like any person using DotNetNuke, when 5.0 is officially released to the public, we're going to jump on the bandwagon and say "DotNetNuke 5.0 Rocks! Get it now!"
This is a complete non-answer to Bill's comment. Sure, I expect any smart DotNetNuke business person will market DNN 5.0 when it comes out. However, DotNetNuke 5.0 has not been officially released to the public. The fact that you mislead community members into thinking that you are already running "DotNetNuke 5.0 Cambrian" is the objectionable behavior. We have communicated this both publicly and privately and have asked that you stop deceiving the community in this fashion. I want your business and every other business running on DotNetNuke to thrive, but not by following unethical and deceptive business practices.
There are lots of areas where DotNetNuke can be improved. The same is true of any project and company. We work hard every day and hope that at the end of the week we have made progress in the right direction. While not always at the pace everyone would like, including ourselves, we hope that people are seeing progress being made. We appreciate comments and suggestions made in the spirit of trying to help the project, however, working to actually fix problem areas is more appreciated. There are thousands of people who are willing to tell you how you are screwing up. Unfortunately there have only been a few dozen who have truly been willing to step up and do anything substantive to help improve things. Will you be one of the thousands, or will you be one of the few who truly make DNN run?