CMSCowgirl - are you able to contact me directly - I am in EXACT SAME BOAT as you and would be interested in having a discussion (by phone) with someone who is impartial and unbiased.   brewsterweb@gmail.com

My experience doesn't match yours. Over the last few years I have seen commercial software products appear to stagnate.  No software company is going to admit it in their marketing material, but it's true.  What I have started to see is that open source products take on a life of their own because there are groups of people who are willing to "volunteer" their services in exchange for propogating software systems that are usable by many companies.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is in a technical person's best interest to have competitive, elegant solutions "out in the wild" available to choose from and offer paid consulting, installation, and support services.  The software and knowledge is free to anyone who is smart enough to take advantage of it.   And those that want superiour service, can pay for it.  So more and more, companies WANT their employees to support open source systems in the wild, to encourage free and open competition.

The drive of commerical software companies to lower costs, from my perspective, has caused their support to actually be inferior to what open source solutions can offer.  Plus, it is in an open source system's best interest to offer simpler, yet elegant solutions that are easier to maintain than commerical systems.  Prior to open systems coming on the scene, commerical systems were making more and more complex solutions that required highly-paid consultants.

Personally, I recommend you not be concerned with whether a product is open source or commercial, but which is more simple and elegant and which one is more complex and harder to use -- in short which one can most easily do the jobs you need it to now and later.  Maybe your responses are more "laid back" from the open source community because the people here not as concerned about selling you a product as we are concerned about making it work the way we would like it to work.  It is fairly routine to see posts in open source forums saying "sell me on your product".  Our question to you so more along the lines of : "Are you looking to buy-in to marketing hype or are you going tell us how you are going buy-in to a product and help us with  the effort to improve the product?"

Good luck in your search.  The good news is there is plenty to choose from.

You really nailed in that last post Thanig.  The bottomline is that DNN is faaaaaaaaaaaaaar more elegant than Ektron.  The underlying design forms a foundation on which you could build anything.  Many of us here in this community sense something, that we have hold of something great, with even greater potential.

Once you are locked into a Product, it's really hard to get out.  Here is my recommendation to Ektron:  Take DNN and integrate all your cool bells and whistles into it as modules.