Hi Guys
A couple of things to cover here.
Firstly - with the Professional Product pricing - it's not my department at all as far as DotNetNuke, but I know from first hand experience that establishing a price for software is an extremely difficult process. The Url Master module has always been one of the more expensive modules and as such I heard many complaints over the years that it was too expensive. So it's always going to be tough to set a price, and no price set (even free) is going to suit all customers.
Secondly - with the rolling up of improved Url functionality into the DotNetNuke core it is my hope that many of the people who purchased the Url Master module will no longer need any Url solution, because the core offering will be that much better. I know from seeing many customer installs how many people were only using the basic features of the module, and the basic features will be there in every edition of DotNetNuke. The ability to set the Url for a DNN page will finally be part of the core offering, as it probably should have been several versions back. These are the sorts of things that everyone will get, and that will make a lot of difference to a lot of people. I've spent years of my life working at making the Url experience on DotNetNuke better for many people - I published free and commercial versions of Url rewriters - and I'm certainly not going to abandon those goals now that I'm inside the Citadel gates, so to speak. The platform will get better Urls as soon as I can make that happen.
As far as DNN taking top modules off the market - it's a pretty rare event, and as Shaun alluded to in his blog, took a lot of perseverance on my part to seeing it through. This is because the company of a whole is acutely aware of the importance of the third-party ecosystem. It's also a reflection of the fact that DNN now has a very strong engineering team, and they can produce these types of solutions themselves easily if need be - it's just a matter of priorities. The Url module was something that should have been part of the core, whereas personally (and I can't speak for the executive team) I don't see any encroachment on the myriad of content modules that are currently available.
I certainly understand some of the doubt and uncertainty that gets created with an announcement like this, but I'm positive that this is going to work out well for everyone in the long run. A lot of time has been spent finessing the finer points and thinking these things through, and I'm happy with the balance that was achieved as an outcome. Certainly I would prefer to be Father Christmas and just announce that something that formerly cost money would now be free, but that just couldn't be the case.