Excuse my English...

Wow, when I sat down to write this discussion, I did not think it will matter so much. This only confirms the fact that this issue bothers a lot of friends here.

I think there is a gap between our complaints compared to DNNCorp's point of view. I must emphasize the main problem that bothers me and many others today:

First. You preset, under the same site, two different products. One of which is an open source platform, with a community, and the other is a closed-garden commercial product, with a very-high price. The feeling it gives is that we have become an underdog, secondary importance, watching the old glory passing away. We are bombarded daily with advertisements, newsletters, Facebook status, messages and other ads about webinars, docs, blogs, all about the shining "Evoq", and hardly a word about the Platform. It feels like we're out of the game. And you can come and flaunt these words explanations of "how we work" and "How it helps the platform, but It's just not enough. If people tell you that there is a problem - Try to check yourself, can you be wrong?

Two. DNN Corp. behaves in a frightening way which is usually reserved to huge companies like google & Apple. This happens when you come among us and just easily acquire the main modules representing for us the center of our sites. Easily tearing them from us, and put them exclusively in your closed-garden products. It is just immoral, unfair, and quite undermines the trust between us. Why should I invest money in modules today, build upon and base major parts of my sites on it, when I know that tomorrow, DNN Corp (itself!), the father & mother of my cms, might take it from me? How can we base a future relationship between us like that? And everybody here tells you the same thing: You are more than welcome to do whatever you want with your site, products and modules - We are happy for all the huge changes, and your financial success. But why do you take out modules from us and then take it out of the store too? Why not reserve it to us, so we can continue to enjoy them? 

Why are you punishing us for your growth?

Three. Evoq's prices are way too high for us. Years we were with you, we deserve to enjoy this upgrade, which is, again, very welcomed, But we are independent developers, most of us cannot efford to spend an amount of a new car on our social websites and portals. Not enough you have taken these products from us, you do not even allow us to purchase them at a fair price, so can you blame us of feeling kicked out?

Shai Eden
Israeli website developer (Working only with DotNetNuke)

First of all, I think it's important to consider that Evoq is simply a series of solutions that can be plugged into the DNN Framework (Navins image at http://www.dnnsoftware.com/blog/cid/3... shows that well).

As such, there is no difference in many ways between Evoq and any other DNN extension you would buy - though obviously as Evoq is made by DNN Corp staff they can ask for core updates to support use-cases for them (or more normally contribute the code to the DNN Platform), so its probable that the level of integration will be better for Evoq over other extensions. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from creating similar packages e.g. if I wanted to I could create a product similar to Evoq Content by writing a document library (or using one such as DMX), and then write modules that use the DNN Platform APIs to add the mobile, search engine extensions, granular permissions (already a free codeplex project) etc. , and I could then pick a price point that I thought would work.

I think it's probably better to think of Evoq as a completely separate entity (one that sponsors lots of developers to work on the DNN Platform). The Evoq team has picked their market and set their prices accordingly - and if those prices are out of your range that's a pity - but if there are enough people like you then I'm sure someone will write something (using the platform API) and sell it (if there's a market a product will inevitably appear) - alternatively if Evoq Social's pricing model turns out to be wrong I'm sure they'll change it and perhaps then it becomes an option.

I know the team spent a long time on the pricing for Evoq social, and so far the price has been very successful (plenty of customers and prospects) - oddly enough one of it's selling points is it's price, very few comparable offerings offer a "low" fixed price, most are much higher (72,000 for jive) or have per user/month pricing points (e.g. $3 per user per month means that if you have more than 300 users then Evoq is "cheap" in relative terms -some of our customers have ten's of thousands of users so for them it's very economical).

One final point, I recommend adding enhancement requests to http://www.dnnsoftware.com/voice - and get people to vote for them. Ordering the list by votes, the first social related item is number 35 on the list - whilst I believe there is a great demand for more social in the DNN Platform (mainly as I'm in the forums a lot), the votes are low for social items which would suggest not everyone feels strongly about it - or think other things are more important.

Community Voice is very important as its where we (the platform team) pick up many of our enhancements from (you can filter on scheduled to see whats coming soon - http://www.dnnsoftware.com/voice/?pag...= (some of these were logged by the platform team as we had early access to it and logged all the things that annoy us or that we know the community already wants - though lots of people voted for them which is the important thing). Whilst that scheduled list is probably more than we can get done in 7.2.0, I encourage you to log ideas (and get votes) so that when we look next we can consider them

I'm afraid I can't answer many of the questions/points from the previous posts as they're different departments from mine and it would not be professional (or fair) for me to comment on. I am an engineer on the DNN Platform team and I can only provide my (personal) comments and perspective.

The platform team are working hard on community contributions and improving things for developers - we'll be blogging about changes soon so I can't say too much now, but some of the changes are already improving things (e.g. in 7.1.2 we've already fixed 40 issues that had "includes code fix" community contributions - as far as I know this is the most ever for a release). I enjoy hearing peoples comments and believe me we argue many of them internally, but as an employee I have to be careful to respect my fellow employees and mitigate my responses accordingly.

Finally, and I know it's not a popular statement, but Evoq Social is not an upgrade - it is a brand new product written almost entirely from scratch (it leverages the activesocial API that was integrated into the platform as well as the service framework, but all the extensions are new). Thousands of developer/designer/QA hours went into it, and the team have selected a price point that works for them. This is no different from any other company creating a new product - except that Evoq's income is what pays for the work on the free DNN Platform.