Greg,

I tend to agree, with Tony, that Telerik controls are not the basis for success of DNN framework or modules, there are a number of existing great controls from other developers as well - MS AJAX Control Kit and JQuery UI are just two prominent alternatives. The more important subject is setting up UI standards to provide users with a consistent UI, and this is a big subject, the new Experience group within the core team is going to take care of.  I know a number of developers, who are able with ease to provide a confusing UI, even if provided with the best set of controls ;)

Greg,

  Also, I think that like you a lot of us are very passionate about DotNetNuke and want to continue to see the project grow and thrive.  I would be more concerned if people didn't voice their opinions on these issues.  People do not tend to voice concerns about products they don't care about and it is obvious from your comments that you care about the future of the project.

Regardless of what happens with Investors or management or the sales organization, you should know that you have several strong Open Source advocates in DNN Corp who are just as concerned about the PE vs CE issue and not allowing commercial concerns to undermine the project.  Shaun, Scott, Nik and myself were very selective about the management team we chose to bring in early on and the investors we chose to do business with.  We made it clear from our earliest meetings with all the interested parties that we were firmly committed to DotNetNuke as an Open Source project.  The end result is that we have a team in place that I think understands the value of Open Source and that is committed to making sure we continue to grow the Open Source side of the project.

One thing that Scott alluded to in his earlier post is that just because a feature exists in PE at a given point in time, does not mean it will always exist solely in PE.  There are already some features that started out development as PE features but which were subsequently ported to CE.  I expect this trend to continue.  As you commented, feature wise there is not as much differentiation as we might like, but it is getting better.  Until we hit a point where there is good separation, then we might be biased just a little in keeping features like the RADEditor a PE only feature for a short while.  It won't be like that forever and we try our best to make sure we are balanced about how we add new features.

Ultimately, I know that we spend far more effort now on improving CE than we have at any point in the past.  We now have several, full-time, paid staff who are working on community edition whereas prior to founding DNN Corp, there was just Charles.  This investment in CE will only continue to grow, because as Scott pointed out, without CE and without a vibrant and thriving community, there is no PE.

"Open Source with a mandatory donation".. Do you have examples of popular open source projects which have gone that route because they couldn't survive on their own? I can't think of any. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla ... etc  are doing just fine and are more popular than DNN. Maybe the inception of the corp and paid DNN developers are the reason why DNN Is not working like the other open source CMS's?

The corp can offer hosting with premium features. WordPress is doing this.Wordpress has millions of users, is profitable for its creator and has a very thriving community. There shouldn't be any reason the same van'r be replicated with DNN.

There are other methods to pay for the development of DNN CE.