The forums may be a major part of the community but not DNN any more.  They are a commercial entity and as soon as the pesky freeloaders disappear, the happier they will be.   It's cleverly masterminded.  For anyone to say any different, you're either an employee or part of the top echelon of the boys club.  It's not good or bad, it just is and if they didn't have a community it wouldn't matter to them one iota.  They have a sales team that is strong and active and looking to pick up where anyone drops off and selling services.  I can't for the life of me think, even today, no matter how hard I try, about why DNN Corp thinks that we're so incredibly stupid to not see this and just come come clean.  They picked the eyes out of those who were busy providing cool free modules and additions and in some instances, it was good because they were put into the core product, but they took those wonderful developers out of the market to be innovators of anything except DNN commercial.  And again, I'm just expressing what my old eyes can see, having been using DNN for a decade, and seeing how it's changed over years.  New people coming to DNN have no idea the product is open source, they are hungrily snapped up by the persistent and rather intense sales people selling the virtues of paying thousands each year for a product that, if they could find in the first place, might not have been dropped into the sales funnel of emails and phone calls to sell it.

 Further to my observation on this approach is their desire to remove any possible selling of modules from a developers own website and removing anyone who links back to their site to sell a module.  It's used under the guise of 'we want to ensure quality' but come on guys - these are developers who are now being dictated to on how they sell their products. 

Personally I'm seeing more opportunity selling something to the Apple market taking 30% with a growing audience, that DNN taking 25% on a diminishing market... just puttin' it out there guys, since I've been tracking the uptake of DNN by comparison to other CMS's and it's dropping like a hot potato, but what does that matter?  You see, logistically, I'm getting less enquiry for cheap skins, having raised the bar and doing high level work only, and while the enquiry is less, the quality of the enquiry is significantly higher, so I don't care that I lose a few of the cheaper projects as we're well past this in the maturity of services offered by our company.

I know I might sound cynical, but I'm just calling this as I see it.  You see, if you you lose 10-15% of the 'free loader' community per year, and you are still selling more of your commercial product, then after say - 5 - 6 years, there is no DNN community, just the commercial product and I say it's going beautifully to plan.  

Things change, and DNN has changed, but they are putting the value of the project up to make good money out of it, and we had an enjoyable journey along the way but please stop talking to use as if we're stupid.  I think that's what pisses people off a bit - patronising us with prose and long stories of vision when we're left most of the time blind sided with stuff that just 'happens' without any discussion with community, and at the end of the day, we can't complain since it's not our project anyway.

 That's my take, I've had my cup of tea this morning and my dose of 'reality' when I read comment by the 'echelon and employees' talking to us as if we're idiots.  Guys - stop patronising us and then giving us S@#t when no one is volunteering for projects - you created this by taking away any incentive for us to put our time into your project.  Why in anyone's mind would I sit down now and write code updates for something that ends up with DNN corp customers first?  I can't in my head get this formula right, although I confess I was never that good at math, there are other logics that take place.   As a person who has contributed thousands of hours to help build the community, whether it's through my skins, forum support, phone and email support, to help build the community to what it was before it went commercial, so I see the value, but now with current marketing of DNN, newcomers don't even know there is a community edition when they come to the site -they are encouraged to 'try' 'trial download' . 

There is no sense of community so people coming here have a different attitude.  DNN IS NO LONGER  A COMMUNITY PROJECT.  IT'S A COMMERCIAL ENTITY, so don't use your sarcasm and say - only a couple of people have contributed.    The people who used to contribute now work for the company, the developers who had modules that were popular were bought out, the developers who throw money at DNN for advertising are featured and you bought the primary store for selling online and you're in the process of removing anyone's listing who uses the store to sell their own products on their own site for the good of 'quality' modules.

I think I've said enough to rile a few, but guys get a reality check and stop being so defensive over the captain obvious.  DNN is not the same, it was a community project, it's moving away from it, and if you don't like it - find something else. Which based on my tracking of CMS popularity, that's exactly what's happening, and for DNN Corp it means nothing because they are getting sales.

Nina Meiers