It's been really tough to even keep up with this thread in recent days. But I have to admit I have found all of the posts very professional and thoughtful. It was great to see so many of the high profile members of our community weigh in on this discussion. It really helped emphasize that our ecosystem is mature, highly complex, and business focussed. And it was also clear that each stakeholder has a different perspective and a different motivation when it comes to market dynamics - which is a perfectly natural and healthy phenomenon. I personally want to thank everyone who participated in this thread. Although a casual observer may think this thread was a dumping ground for any number of random topics, I think the discussion actually flowed quite naturally from one subject to the next. And the fact that it succeeded in bringing the majority of the sensitive issues out into the open is actually a great thing for communication and transparency.

With a thread this long, there are many questions, comments, and opinions which have been left hanging at this point. And the danger is that unless they are definitively addressed, people will come to their own conclusions and misconceptions which will further exacerbate the problem. So I have made a list of all of the general themes which I believe require further clarification, and will do my best to address them in subsequent posts. Please accept my apology in advance if you are tired of following this thread, and would prefer if it would simply fade away...

So lets get started...

First, I would like to get some facts out into the open. Yes, we raised 2 rounds of venture capital. Yes, we now have investors who have a stake in the company. We have a Board of Directors as well. The Board has representation from each of the venture capital firms who invested in the company ( Vivek Mehra - August Capital, Tim Guleri - Sierra Ventures, and Chris Cooper - UV Partners ). It also has company representation from myself and our CEO, Navin Nagiah. Lastly, it has independent representation from the community - Larry Augustin is an open source visionary and legend. We are in the process of recruiting another independent Board representative as well to fill the 7th seat and complete the team. What is the motivation of the Board? It is simple: to ensure that DotNetNuke grows and prospers. This does not simply mean monetization. The folks on our Board have extensive enterprise software business experience and open source community experience. They fully understand that you need both key ingredients to ensure the longevity, health, and success of a platform. They understand that you can not neglect one at the expense of the other. I can safely say this because in the past year I have sat in heated Board meetings where the investors were far more concerned about community vitality than they were about sales revenue. Hard to believe? For some I guess, but I suppose some people will always prefer a good conspiracy theory to reality. To state that DNN Corp is one Board meeting away from doing something stupid, or that Founders are not decision makers anymore and have no influence over the future of the platform or community, is ludicrous. The Board does not run the company. It provides strategic advice, guidance, and business connections and demands accountability and performance. It trusts and relies upon the Management team and Employees of the company to define the strategy and execute on it.

Shaun, thank you for taking (again) the lead on this issue. I am not a high profile member of DNN community (just a member :) ) but my company is built around the platform since 2004 and as a custom module developer and system integrator DNN is vital to my business as you can imagine. I am sure there are many many like me that are anxious to here what you say.
I don't think any one of the people taking part of this thread and the many that just read it will get tired of the issue. I am sure all are encouraging you to keep on this. I personally find your stepping in and trying to clear the fog and filling the lack of information as a serious and responsible act.
Thank you.
Yehuda

"Based on your 5% conversion factor, a forced upgrade of all the about 500.000 sites could yield as much as 50 million dollars of annual revenue if done properly."

I appreciate the desire to do some financial forecasting; however, I need to point out where the assumptions are wrong. Simply stated, a "forced" upgrade is not possible. It is not possible from a technical perspective as this is not a hosted model - people run our software in their own environments. It is not possible from a legal perspective because the software is licensed under a BSD license which gives the end user the full rights utilize the software as they wish. And to add further clarification, a conversion factor of less than 5% is normal for every open source software company who also offers a commercial version ( ie. JBOSS, mySQL, stc... ). The fact is, the majority of people will not pay regardless of the price point or extra benefits being offered. This may seem shocking to some, but there is plenty of evidence to support this phenomenon ( and we have certainly witnessed it ourselves over the years ).

In regards to the question on Licensing, one of our traditional project values is that "our open source license is our key to adoption and growth". The Community Edition will always be available under the BSD license. It is the backbone upon which this ecosystem was built. And it has been essential in terms of gaining business acceptance in many large scale organizations. Our stance on licensing has been reiterated time and again over the past 8 years through words and actions, but the doubt still continues to surface from time to time. I am not sure how we could make this any more clear.

Which leads us to the Telerik licensing question raised earlier. When I approached Telerik last year to pursue an OEM relationship, I had specific goals in mind. We wanted a toolset which would allow us to modernize the DotNetNuke user experience. And it was important that the toolset was not only available in Professional Edition, it needed to be available to everyone in the ecosystem. Now Telerik does not offer its tools under an open source license, so we spent considerable time and money to ensure that that OEM license would not violate the freedoms of our users. Telerik was more than willing to accomodate us, and only had a couple specific limitations which they wanted to include. One limitation was that the Telerik components could only be used within DotNetNuke - they wanted to avoid a situation where a developer could utilize their controls in a custom ASP.NET application. The other restriction was in regards to Community Edition developer usage; since the vitality of their business is based on selling licenses to developers, they wanted to restrict Community Edition developers from using their controls "natively". This restriction contradicts our earlier stated goal of ensuring the controls are available to everyone in the ecosystem. So to mitigate this restriction, we negotiated an alternative usage scenario where DNN Corp is allowed to build "wrappers" around the Telerik controls and expose them through the DotNetNuke API. This enables Community Edition developers to utilize a subset of the Telerik control functionality without breaking the license agreement. Unfortunately, when we introduced the Telerik controls in version 5.2, we did not have sufficient time to create wrappers and as a result, the benefit was rather limited. We recently hired a full-time UI/UX specialist who is going to be focussed on this area - so the story should become much better soon.

To clarify another question related to Telerik in this thread, when we established the OEM relationship it was critical that we did not affect the open source freedoms which the project was founded upon. As a result, Navin and I worked extensively with our attorney ( Mark Radcliffe from DLA Piper, a recognized open source intellectual property industry expert ) to ensure the agreement protected the interests of the community. The end result was an OEM agreement which retained the key tenets of open source. What I mean is that it is still possible for our users to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the DotNetNuke software. Telerik is embedded as a licensed component ( much like FCKEditor or SharpZipLib ) with the only restriction being that the Telerik controls can not be removed from the distribution and used independently. Now it is fairly normal for licensing agreements to be complex artifacts; and it is also normal for developers to mistakenly think that they have the necessary level of legal expertise to analyze these agreements and come to educated conclusions. I have been guilty of this myself in the past, but I have learned over the years that it is best to leave intellectual property matters in the hands of professionals who specialize in these matters. I have total confidence in our legal counsel to ensure the freedoms of the community are preserved.