I am a DNN'r for over a decade now. I was always happy to spread the rumor about DNN being a free and open network. But lately, unfortunately, I don't feel at home... All these commercials & money floating all over, are making me feel so not important as before. The pure solution is being introduced in the website as the underdog, being casted by the shadows of the new logos and the very costly "Evoq" this and Evoq that. 

So you like the big money, and it's fine with me, really. But you should know, that there is a very large talk between developers and users of the free platform, that are actually thinking to leave DNN after years of being loyal to the community, to other solutions like wordpress and Joomla. The main reason, is the fear of the end of the free platform. It feels like us, free users, are now officially the less important side of the huge DNN community, and may be the first to be kicked out, when you finish your ride to acquire this and that and those... DNN Corp, as it feels, is hiding us from the big customers. For an example, it took me several minutes to actually find where you hid this forum (At the end I just googled it!).

What will happen? The future will reveal. But for now, I feel bad with what is happening. I really feel like there is a huge question-mark all over my portals, and all over the beloved project. 

Hope I'm wrong... (Am I?)

Shai Eden,
DNN Portals Developer, Israel

Shai, it is a sad thing that you are feeling this way. I can assure you that we will NOT abandon the community, and in fact, we are putting more effort behind this than we've done in a long time. One such thing that we did last month was to open up the development process for the platform. IE, if you look at new issues being created, you will see that we are creating stories for development of the 7.2 version, which means that as a community member you will have an early opportunity to interact with our developers (most of the developers on the Platform team are long time community members btw). Also, we are going to move our source repository to GitHub, which makes is MUCH.. did I say MUCH MUCH, easier for community members to contribute code to the platform. In fact, we are already working with community members to do just that. The velocity of community contributed code is much higher than it has been for a long time.

So yes.. it is sad. But mainly because apparently even though we are doing a lot of things for the community, this goes unnoticed ... I have good hopes that that will change though.

BTW.,. i am curious. Why would you leave a .NET platform for a PHP one. There must be other reasons than not being happy with the way we handle community...

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Erik van Ballegoij, Former DNN Corp. Employee and DNN Expert

DNN Blog | Twitter: @erikvb | LinkedIn:

Hi and thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it.

I'm glad to hear you understand the importance of keeping our community as the key to the success of the DNN project. My feeling is mainly coming from what is reflected through the site. The Evoq products, sparkling and stimulating (if they were not so expensive perhaps many of us would even buy them), while the community is presented as in secondary importance to the flagship product, the "Evoq", when the real product is the free platform - It is this that forms the basis for what is happening with dnn ten years. This is a change to the way this site was managed here for the last ten years.

One thing which makes many of us feel bad is the way DNNCorp acquires modules that were already being used by the community, taking out features, and leaving parts to the platform, while putting the whole module to the commercial products, and continuing the develop of it solely to that. For example - The latest purchase of URLMatster. I was a customer of the product, and now I understand that DNNCorp acquired it (which is great news, Bruce is a great guy), but then took out many of the features I already had, and put it only for commercial users. Same with products like ActiveSocial: You took the product from the people, and stopped its developing process from us, taking it only for your commercial products (and needs). This is such a not-friendly way to do things. From the one hand you say that the community is very important, and I believe you, but from the other hand you are taking features from us, modules which we paid for in good money, and leave us - out.

I guess many developers who have already abandoned or closed their business, working out of this feeling. When the free platform & the community received the stars at the time, was here a sense of something that is important to all of us - A real open-source community where we are making it TOGETHER. Now, when I browse the site, I feel totally secondary importance, if not less. This is why I recommend to disconnect the products, create a completely separate website for the free community and not mix the two under the same home. Our sense becomes more pleasant when we are bound to see all these "fantastic" products published all around us, products which most of us can't afford to buy.

If you want to attract productive and vibrant community as it was here before, you should not flaunt them the good qualities of the product that they cannot achieve. If you want to win a girl's heart - you don't show her your more beautiful mistress...

There is a simple path to fix this, before it is too late:
1. Separate the commercial products from the free Platform - Two different sites.
2. DO NOT take out features from products that have already been purchased to be solely present in the commercial products - Not Fair.
3. Bring back the feeling of importance to the open-source community.

With regards, Shai