Like many in the community we spent countless hours the first 4 years of the project volunteering our time to make this project work. That has not stopped just because we formed a company. In fact many of us spend far more hours today than we ever did before.
Joe, I think you eat better at night now though.
You're getting rewarded significantly more than you were before, whereas many community contributors may not be. You are now getting access to the modules that other community members used to edit //sell// buy but will no longer be able to and wonder how many others will just disappear from the market. There is absolutely no guarantee this will not continue to happen as the precedence has been set.
How would it be if the 50 top community / integrator / developer members in DNN got together and decided to move towards another .net open source product? What if they were concerned enough to think that within 2 years there would be no DNN community left to market to because the good modules were gone and their customer base was being marketed to by the DNNCorp encouraging them to purchase PE, get access to modules that were no longer available. It would be devasting to the project and I urge people to think long and hard before taking this sort of action as they also have a customer base to support who use DNN and if the move was monetary and political, rather than if it was a lousy product, there seems to be so much more to lose for many.
I'm happy to talk to anyone who's not comfortable with this activity and assess what other options are available, even to the point of working with a team to bring in some competition with Snowcovered and generate an online sales environment that developers get more monetary benefits, more say with better control over the environment which many feel has been sold out. It's another approach for developers to show they are unhappy, whereas at the moment, there is no where else to sell a module so when unhappy, what options do they have? Having the mothership growing, cooking and delivering the food can't always be healthy can it?? Perhaps we need more variety?
Please guys, why not look at other options here that can be used to bring about better balance in the system that makes it 'proactive' for those of us, the community, because what I am reading is that no matter what has been stated,DNN has turned into a commercial venture, there are stakeholders who expect returns and they have to look for solutions that will be suit the shareholders. It will not change, there is no indication that this decision will be reversed.
I agree with Will, the last 12 months has been quite stressful and I have had to look at other products to offer clients which I loathe doing because I'm so heavily invested in DNN but the surprise element at times makes me feel that the community is completely disregarded and therefore our input now is no longer needed or required as you have the money behind you to do and act how you want.
Anyway - if anyone is interested in exploring the options of a competition to snowcovered because you feel too close to the source, ping me. I can't guarantee anything, but I can listen and I do have some excellent contact and a large clean list of active DNN people who might like to explore a new product.
Nina