Evoq is just a cute new baby, and is giddy about making a splash in the US. I do not see DNN Pro or CE being sidelined. Evoq seems to be priced for the US commercial market where half of the workforce works for large multi-divisional corporations, with 500 or more Full Time Employees. Those thousand of firms on Russels2000 list. Which proportion of customers with less than 100 employees can afford DNN Pro but cannot afford Evoq? And if there is no DNN Pro, what then? Give Evoq 6-9 months to find its feet. Settle down.
On this side of the Atlantic, the employed workforce is to 3/4 organised in many small one divison family like orperations with less than 250 Full Time Employees. Yes, alot of these enterprises subscribe to some co-orperative type of „Thing“, like raifeisen, baywa, edeka, or migros, but they are autonomous in thier assets. The once mighty 60k FTE Hoesch Steel is today 300+ independent companies. The swiss-swede 140k FTE Asea Brown Boveri had less than 300 people in their headoffice in 2011. The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland combined have a smaller population than California. In the thriving Swiss-Germany-Austria sphere there are less than 60 cities with more than 150k in population. And the German DAX stock index is made up of only 30 firms. And these are, besides France, the „big markets“ on the Continent. Big perhaps at the DNN Pro price of two cups of starbucks coffee per day. It is a different world.
Maybe the problem is in the way in which we the community relate to the modules available through the store. The Platform is robust, with ten or more people who know all the ropes. Even if 3-5 people suddenly decide to go, it will probably survive. Store modules are different. Which modules in the store are run like open source projects? Which ones can survive when the lead developer stops leading? Who knows how to activemodules is maintained? Or the next one yet to go?
We do not cultivate an opensource culture of adopting abandoned modules. Maybe we should be more prepared for these types of changes. Pooling the revenue from prervious adoptions to finance future adoptions. Find a way to reasign responsibilty when someone who knows most about a specific module of interest looses his interest. I asume there are about 40 or less such unique modules. How many in the community should be expected to know, or should be asigned to know all the ropes beside the lead developer of a particular module in the store? Which ones of us should second the developers? We, an opensource community of 700k or more registered members? Dont we need some „Thing“ here?
What does history tell us? Marco Borries Open-Office will be thirty years old next easter, despite multiple MBA induced asset shuffles. I would be happy today if the DNN platform or the community had assimilated lucas labs reports, aquitydps oracle dataproviders, Niks Filemanager, and the Xlists. Had we had a way of securing survival after their originators lost interest, we would still have them with us today. Either somewhere in DNN Pro or living in the store. Operations live on information.With them we would probably be doing alot more wow! intranets now.
Blame me. I regret not having shown more interest in Andrews Reports Module. I will certainly regret not having the time now and the energy today to share a template for the form and list module, or for xmod, or for a custom activeforums topicsview. Like you, I have a busy life to tend to. Honestly, how many of us really took the time to iterate with silverlight? how many of us only looked on when the platform got the blame as Flatburger got grilled on the firewalls? or how many of us had sleepless nights because the DAL-as-a-service was „not evolving“, as the one developer was busy extending his house?
Evoq is a cute new baby, that just needs some breadthing space. Let her have some.