IMHO, the basic question is the motivation for developers to create and to maintain software:

1. money (even developers need to pay their rent, coce and pizza)
2. fame
3. fun

#1 meets michaels first and third arguments, his other two are more regarding #3. Problem with fun products usally is, that it is nice to produce an initial version, but oftenly it lacks on interest in maintaining and improving the software. Remains #2 - unfortunately the DNN project and community are not very good in providing recognition for free code of any kind, it seems to me that other projects have better cultures to celebrate it.

my 2 cents.

As usual @Alex

Also, as usual, I think Sebastian hit the nail on the head, "unfortunately the DNN project and community are not very good in providing recognition for free code of any kind, it seems to me that other projects have better cultures to celebrate it."

I recently went on a module search for a specific module and during that process I found tons of free modules. Michael Washington, Mitch Sellers, Brandon Haynes, Oliver Hine, etc. just to name a few, all produce free modules for the community. The issue is not that there isn't very many free modules the issue is that there isn't a good DNN community portal that provides a single location to find them. It's kind of like how you can now find MUCH more information about DNN outside of DNN.com than on DNN.com.

I'll say it one more time - DNN DESPERATELY needs a real community portal in addition to a Corp site. A community site that:

1. Dogfoods the latest versions so the Corp site isn't down when you point clients to it.
2. Actually might use the core survey module. In almost 4 years I've never seen the survey module in use on DNN.com.  Hummm... what should that tell us?
3. Provides an RSS display of Dotnetnukeblogs.com
4. Allows many people to post blogs on the site instead of being locked down to just a few. It it weren't for Michael and a couple of others I fear the current DNN blogs would die a quick death.
5. Provides an RSS display of the site that displays different DNN portals/skins - can't remember the name of it off hand.
6. Has Forums that work!!!!!
7. Has post-moderation provided by community members instead of pre-moderation on forums. It's not like Sebastian doesn't read every post within minutes of being posted!! (grin) There are several other community members that spend a large amount of time in the forums too.
8. Has a free modules listing. Yes, I know about the forge - take a look at it and tell me what % of free modules are listed there.
9. Uses third party modules so we can show what DNN is really capable of!
10. In short- aggregates all things DNN into one site.

I'm sure that community members could add to this list. I'm willing to help with a community portal if others are.