Forgive me, there are a number of thoughts to reply to and so I am going to start replying to them in individual posts. Ideally, we will branch these into other threads as they become clearer conversations apart from this thread.
Lars, I have appreciated many of your comments and hope that you don't mind that I use some of them to respond to the subjects at hand. My responses are for everyone, but I will play off of your comments as context.
Lars Tungen wrote:
Tony Hussein wrote:
There was no guarantee that the exclusive features in the current PE version were ever going to be developed based on volunteer work if the corp hadn't gotten extra money. Those features could be a direct result from paying for developers.
I have never complained about the corporation adding value to their products. My concern is that they prevent the community in adding value to the CE product.
The DotNetNuke Open Core is developed today almost exactly the same way it has been since Shaun first created it. It is a misconception that things are more "closed" than they were before, if anything... it is actually a bit more open. We didn't even have a shared source code reposibtory until we introduced the Vault around the time we were developing version 3. And at that point, many people were participating (people who are still on the team today) as aspects of the changes in v3 were "bulk" in nature (eg. creating and testing the data access layer, etc). Other items that folks participated in were from various skinning prototypes, none of which were actually used, but which ultimately came together in a unified solution. Trustees on the team had and still have access to the core source code, they still do fix bugs based on community feedback from Gemini, etc. Today we actually have our source code exposed on Codeplex and are continuously improving our ability to keep that fresh (it is stable code, not the unstable dev tip). Accepting code contribution through Gemini has become easier as the product has improved (we've been Gemini users since v1.0). I could say more, but trying to keep it brief.
We actually work very hard at accepting contribution from the Community for CE. I believe we have improved on our ability and success at that a bit (even it it is not as visible as it should be, different subject). I know we continue to work on imroving it. For example, Gemini is better managed and responded to now than ever before in our history... and that comes with commitment from the company to keep engineers engaged and responsive to the activity in the issue tracker.
The other aspect of "adding value to CE" is simply through extensions. The company adds value to PE in the same way. Simple things like the skinning contest which have just added 25 new open source skinning projects testify to how easy it is for people to add value to CE. The skinning contest is an example of us needing to help people (who are inclined) do that. We're now working with those vendors to help teach them source control, new packaging techniques, etc. They're interested in being more involved. You're going to see a lot more of that this year. But I hope you also have some understanding of how many corporate hours (in addition to team hours) have been devoted to making that happen and continuing its momentum. None of this is even possible without successful commercial operations to fund it.
Roadmap and product development dicussions I must leave with Shaun but I can say that our own internal processes are starting to mature, which makes room for enhancing them. We've been pretty good about publishing community beta's and taking feedback downstream. I must tell you that we don't get as much feedback as you might think... but we do it anyway because its the right thing to do. I do expect community involvement to occur more upstream over time (and it does have impact in terms of surveys, Gemini, forums, etc), but it is challenging. A challenge we could easily dismiss... but instead choose to engage and address.