Hi Dave,
You are right that DNN Corp needs to profit, but they twisted "community project" into completely different meaning. I've been using DNN for years (since 2007) and now its a deal breaker. The original idea was to add premium support like Vivo Social or NopCommerce or any number of community projects do, but not to develop frikkin standalone commercial product out of it. They took thousands of hours of work from people who reported, fixed, contributed, made possible and just sold it. They turned us into free labor for their business. But all that money they earned from it, isn't channeled back. Nothing they did for those paying ever made it into the community, while everything made by community goes to the commercial. I've seen no new employees or indication they'll ever care about community again. They smelled the big buck and that's practically end of it. At least that's how I feel it, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion :).
I'm not saying Orchard is perfect alternative for everyone, its mostly for developers and hobbyists (for now). But its perfectly designed with dreamy modularity, ANYTHING anywhere can be replaced, inserted, removed. Any view markup can be changed without touching the original files (and razor is awesome and easy to work with even for non-developers). Its extremely fast, concise, clean, well documented. And its true community project, not a single thing is enforced on user. The steering committee sets capabilities of the framework, modules tell how everything works and themes how everything looks. Yes, when it comes to raw functionality DNN has upper hand, but due to nature of the framework I'm actually more productive with Orchard when it comes to custom solutions. When Orchard becomes more popular it will quickly pick up the pace.
You are right that DNN Corp needs to profit, but they twisted "community project" into completely different meaning. I've been using DNN for years (since 2007) and now its a deal breaker. The original idea was to add premium support like Vivo Social or NopCommerce or any number of community projects do, but not to develop frikkin standalone commercial product out of it. They took thousands of hours of work from people who reported, fixed, contributed, made possible and just sold it. They turned us into free labor for their business. But all that money they earned from it, isn't channeled back. Nothing they did for those paying ever made it into the community, while everything made by community goes to the commercial. I've seen no new employees or indication they'll ever care about community again. They smelled the big buck and that's practically end of it. At least that's how I feel it, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion :).
I'm not saying Orchard is perfect alternative for everyone, its mostly for developers and hobbyists (for now). But its perfectly designed with dreamy modularity, ANYTHING anywhere can be replaced, inserted, removed. Any view markup can be changed without touching the original files (and razor is awesome and easy to work with even for non-developers). Its extremely fast, concise, clean, well documented. And its true community project, not a single thing is enforced on user. The steering committee sets capabilities of the framework, modules tell how everything works and themes how everything looks. Yes, when it comes to raw functionality DNN has upper hand, but due to nature of the framework I'm actually more productive with Orchard when it comes to custom solutions. When Orchard becomes more popular it will quickly pick up the pace.