I've been a DNN user from day one and have been a strong advocate within my organization and our industry as a whole, but when the VC money came into play, you knew it was going to be the kiss of death for the general user...

Of course we all need to earn a living and we can't expect things for free without contributing in some way (via code or financially), but when DNN Corp starting buying up the best modules and no longer allowing these to be purchased, that for me is when the milk started to turn sour.

I agree with what’s been said here, there is a "gap" and I think DNN Corp. could easily span that, offer the Evoq products with a no/limited support at a reasonably price ($500/$1000 yr.) and/or sell/license those additional modules piecemeal via the store.

I know DNN Corp isn't in the module development game, but the truth is most of us are mediocre programmers as best (if at all) and once you take the ability away of even buying the decent modules that make the platform worthwhile, then what’s left?

I'm not a Linux/AMP guy, in fact I'm a hardcore Microsoft guy and have been my entire career, I am the VP of IT for a multinational company and for the first time I'm starting to look for alternatives to DNN... It's sad to say, but I'm seriously looking into switching to Drupal.

This is a desperate plea to DNN Corp, but I really do hope they listen to the rumblings and do something about it. I don't think anyone here wants a free ride (well, some do, they always do), but stripping the best modules away and/or letting an old version to languish on codeplex while you keep developing it internally for your own professional products is just going to kill the ecosystem (ala Active Forums, Q&A etc.). It certainly feels like you're building yourself into a closed company, if you want to become Jive, then just be done with it, close the loop and move on, but I really think you're better off "closing the gap", charging an affordable amount for your commercial offerings (as mentioned, with no /little support if that's required) and allowing people buy to buy the commercial functionality if they choose.

There's nothing I can really say or do to make you change your mind, but I thought I would lend my voice in the vague hope that something can be done in time, but ultimately you need to follow the money, but if I had a say, I would say you're more likely to generate more revenue with more installations as a lesser price than the handful of "expensive" (I understand "expensive" is subjective) at full price. If the thought is the increase in support costs would negate those sales, then do it with no/forum only support...

In any case, I have my fingers crossed, but my trust is slipping.

Best of luck, DNN Corp. I hope you have a plan waiting in the wings.

TJ

*** Please note - whilst I work for DNN Corp, these opinions are very much my own and I provide them only to allow people a better look into how we work -and I will refrain from commenting on any commercial decisions DNN Corp make (above my pay grade) ***

I can appreciate peoples comments (and fears) but from my point of view things from a platform perspective are working well - this is much easier for me to see as I'm "inside" as I can see the amount of resources, the plans and the metrics. However I'm sure that determining this type of "project health" is not as easy for people outside the company so I thought I'd type up a quick response to give you an idea how we're working.

Historically DNN was predominantly created by a very small group (at various periods Shaun and Charles were responsible for the majority of coding - with input/code from the old core team, and bugs/features submitted by the community). When the Corp came along this changed, with many new employees (devs, qa, UI, product etc.), and we ramped up quickly, and staff worked on different things as needed. However managing all the different groups and needs was certainly a challenge, and whilst there has been a lot of work done in the platform (which is what we call the free edition/CE) we definitely thought we could manage this better and deliver more.

From an organisational point of view, a while ago we split into different teams (platform, social, content) - this allows us to better focus on our areas. As a member of the platform team it's nice to be able to look at that alone, and not be pulled into areas in the commercial products - we can already see the success of this with ~200 issues tacked in 7.1.1 and already 100+ tackled in 7.1.2. This isn't a surprise as this team has a lot of long-time community members (Joe, Charles, Shaun, ErikVB, myself and others), and I expect us to improve more as time goes on (we're also revising/rebooting community contributions and more aggressively using community voice to decide future enhancements -expect to see some exciting changes here soon). We have a lot of enhancements on our plate as well, hopefully the roadmap can be shared soon  -though if you look in dnntracker.atlassian.net you'll find the majority of them as they're public  with many of them already having excellent feedback from the community/mvps (javascript library management and entity properties are being debated)

Whilst the other 2 teams work on the commercial editions, the reality is that they also contribute bugfixes (that they or their customers find) and enhancements (that they need, but make sense to add to the platform - and which can then be used by everyone). All of this benefits the community and means more paid resource working on "free" stuff i.e. not just the platform team.

Finally, it's important to note that Evoq Social is an entirely new product i.e. it's almost entirely new code (it is not a rebadged ActiveSocial by any stretch of the imagination). Whilst it leverages much of the old ActiveSocial API, this was added into the platform (i.e. the free version) and can similarly be used by everyone. The same applies to Evoq Content - that shiny new digital asset manager that replaced the years old filemanager - that was contributed by that team.

An important thing to note is that the Evoq solutions are how we earn the money to pay for the staff who work on the DNN Platform - whilst I can't really comment on any commercial decisions DNN Corp make, if the solutions were not working then I'm sure we would amend them. We've grown at a very fast pace and continue to grow quickly, breaking sales records regularly. All of this feeds back into the ability to hire additional employees, some of whom will then work on the platform, which to my mind is a virtuous circle. As a company  we're all very well aware that the DNN Platform (or what was called CE) is our major selling point - the majority of our customers experience DNN via it first, and many sales come from people who have used it and grown to such an extent that they want to give us money to provide support/indemnity etc. -to many of these people the Evoq products are a nice, added bonus -if the DNN Platform wasn't maintained and enhanced we would entirely lose that channel and over time the size of the company would reduce (probably drastically)

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