IMO, the DNN community has changed for the worse in the last few years. What used to be a "Community" built around this awesome framework is now so focused on the commercial enterprise, it has lost it's roots.

I know that the community edition is feature packed, but it's been my experience that when a module does so well it becomes the defacto standard that everyone needs to own, DNN Corp will buy it so they can control the market and offer it as part of a commercial product instead. And they give a watered down version to community if we are lucky.

Two vendors in particular: iFinity and ActiveModules were bought out.

Existing ActiveModules users were effectively dropped to the curb with no real upgrades for the past two years, despite promises.

I expect iFinity will go the same route.

Even the store where we buy modules is now owned by DNN Corp. Yep. Now they can even control what products you can buy from the most popular (if not only) community DNN Module store.. If you made a URL module better than iFinity they could lock you out of the store if they wanted. They want to get a monopoly. All the signs are there.

It is my belief that DNN Corp wants to make the Community edition nothing more than a teaser that makes you want to go to commercial product OR abandon it in favor of a true OSS (or at least more community friendly) CMS. To do this, they have to make sure it cannot run features they consider "enterprise" or "professional" unless you pay.

The problem isn't that it costs money to begin with, the problem is that in their supreme wisdom they have decided to remove choices from the market in order to charge you a LOT more money. For example, the $100 ifinity module might cost me $2000 tomorrow because the only way I can get all the features is to buy a commercial version of DNN. Is it worth it to me to pay $2000 when all I need is a $100 feature?

So my question is: How long can DNN Corp sustain this process of taking away the good stuff from community members before the weight of the top heavy DNN Corp just becomes too much to support everything below it?