There are a lot of free modules for DNN. You can check out http://www.cathal.co.uk/Default.aspx for a list of some. I'm not sure how up to date it is but it is extensive. The commercial module developers aren't making a buck off of someone else's work. They're the people that have to write all the code for their particular module. They've just chosen to make it work with the DNN platform. In my mind it's not all that different than a company writing software that runs on either a PC or Apple. The only difference is that they don't have access to the OS source code. DNN is just the platform that their software runs on.

That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call some of the commercial modules "junk". The majority of them are well worth the money and a lot of them are worth far more than the money. A couple that come to mind are Active Forums (http://www.activemodules.com) and the Ventrian modules (http://www.ventrian.com). Will's Active Forums is one of the most robust forums I've ever seen and he's constantly adding new features. Scott Mcculloch's Ventrian site works on a subscription service ($35 gives you access to all his modules and their source for a year) and he's also constantly upgrading his modules.

Last thing, you can still develop for DNN in C#. A lot of people do. That's the joy of .NET. Check out http://www.dotnetnuke.dk. I think he's got some examples of C# code.

I didn't mean to imply that someone shouldn't have the choice to charge money, I just think that the "intrinsic betterment" of a project - the whole dogma of the open-source movement - is a better goal, because it benefits everyone. I've written open-source stuff that several people made improvements to, that I would've never dreamed of doing, and it benefitted them as well as myself. I'm also coming from PostNuke, which seems at first glance to be an environment that really supports open-source mods.

With your comparison between a commercial OS (Windows) and open-source, I don't think that there's any "entitlement" to it, but I would say that I support the idea of commercial software being built on commercial software more than charging for apps developed on a "free" environment.

To me, it's just not as reasonable to develop commercial software on open source, because you're in essence saying that you've invested some time into an app for a free environment that took a lot more time to develop, and want to be compensated for it. Seriously, the free environment took more time to make than the app, and if the founders of it chose to charge for it, they probably wouldn't have gotten very far with it, and then in turn, the commercial developer wouldn't even be in the situation to develop apps - they'd either have to develop their own portal from scratch, or invest in a commercial one. It just seems a tad hypocritical to me, but then again, I've never written an app or created a website that wasn't offered completely free. I've just seen way too much collaborative good come from open source to want to start a commercial venture. Let's face it, if the technologies we take for granted every day, even the little things like HTTP or the JPEG format started to cost license fees payable to the folks who came up with the ideas, a lot of good innovation would be stifled. Even if fees for apps written for free software is "reasonably priced", I just can't afford any of it; I'm still in college, after all, and am not using the portal for commercial reasons that would allow me to charge setup or consultation fees, just to tinker around with on my own home network.

Anyway, that's great that I can use C# to code apps for DNN. I hope I can make a meaninful contribution to the open source environment! Thanks for the links!