My previous post/rant about Community:Forums got the expected reaction, and I entered in an intense and very interesting debate on IM with Rob Howard, one of Telligent founders.
Thanks Rob for the chat, even if we are still in disagreement on some points. I still think, and I am not the only one, that you can't snap your fingers and decide to take an important piece of community development like the forums, and make profit with this, whatever the good and valid excuses you gave me.
From Rob:
We're actually in the process of getting back to Open Source, i.e. allowing external contributions. We've spent the past 4 months with external check-in closed only because we've tried to keep the team small and focused. The plan is to move to a model of a few people that have check-in rights -- we're in the process now of working with those individuals -- similar to how many other large OSS projects are run.
Scott's comment about profitability is not completely accurate in this case. There is both a free version and a commercial version available. The commercial version is $129 and includes forums, blogs, and a photo gallery. Given that we have 6 fulltime people (who we pay) working on the project we would have to sell a lot of the $129 commercial licenses to make a profit and that's just not happening nor did we expect it to.
We actually decided to pursue this route of product licensing based on how we saw the ABM (anything but Microsoft) crowd moving. MySql, PHP Nuke, and many Linux distros have moved to a similar model - whereas there is a time/money continium and they offer both a free and a commercial version of their products.
We will always have a free version available.
However, for people that choose to use the applications commercially we do hope they choose to purchase a commercial license. This helps us develop, maintain, and continue building these solutions.
Our proof of this effort cannot be demonstrated overnight and the skepticism with our intensions is completely fair; we can't prove them otherwise until we have more history to hold up as evidence.
If you want to learn more about what we're doing -- the best place is http://www.communityserver.org. We've done several postings there that discuss our long term plans and goals for these projects.
As for our Whidbey plans, as many people know I used the Forums as my testbed for coming up with Whidbey features such as Membership, Roles, Personalization, Skins, Providers, and many other core ASP.NET 2.0 features. Needless to say, Community Server will have Whidbey capabilities and integration second-to-none <g>. In fact, in our 1.0 release of Community Server we will have a back-ported Membership, Roles, and Personalization system that is forward compatible with Whidbey.
"... The saddest thing is that this again reinforces the Java / Open Source world's view of the .NET community - that as soon as anything seems vaguely profitable then 'community be damned' and profit takes over... "
Jeff has also developed a free forums tool called Popforums and I will have a look at it for my next project. Because not only is free but it has been cleverly developed on a more simple basis than Community:Forums which could be a bit 'heavy weight' for some small projects.
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