The acquisition announcement from both DotNetNuke Corporation and Active Modules Inc was made on Wednesday February 23rd.  DotNetNuke (DNN) had acquired Active Modules (AM) and it's intellectual property (IP). I have been using modules from AM for years, IMHO they have the best forum software for the DNN platform. more recently I started using Active Social (AS), in particular it's Enterprise version. The feature set is rich and there was promise for a new component that was necessary for me. That piece was Active Purchase. Active Modules in my mind have always been a good value for your money, and support has almost always been outstanding.

So, now that I've spent money on this software, DNN is now going to make it open source. Well,....mostly! The key there is mostly! And it's not that going open source part that bothers me, it's the splitting of features and deeming some of them "premium" that ticks me off. The mail connector, which is a piece of software included in he enterprise version will not be released in DNN Community version of it's platform. You'll need to upgrade to the Pro version of DNN @ $2500.00 per install...per year. Oh, and another piece of software that AM has been promising is Active Purchase (AP). Something I have been waiting for for months. AP allows you to conduct e commerce transaction from DNN, and has subscription capabilities baked in. So, in essence you could offer paid for subscriptions to Blogs, support notes, videos, photos or anything else you can think of on a website. Perfect for tiered support/service level agreements!

Well, AP will not be in the Community version of DNN either, you'll need to pony up for the Pro version (mentioned above) or Enterprise version (@ $5000.00 per install...per year!) Now, I have very few clients, especially in today's economy, willing to spend that kind of money. They'd love to have a [business] social site for clients. Something on the order of Facebook for business, but without all the privacy issue, something that AS is very good at.

It's this uncertainty that is causing this sense of betrayal. DNN says they'll have the AM products integrated (with the mail connector and Active purchase omitted) by Q3 or Q4. This is a fairly large window to go without bug fixes and updates. This is assuming that 99% of the resources will be geared to integration.

Its a major concern that for at least some clients, it represents a remarkable price increase for a useful bit of functionality, effectively putting it out of reach. However this does create an avenue for other module developers to write/build onto the AF and AS modules, perhaps to even create a free or low priced mail connector. Maybe even fork the social modules and offer them with similar support that AM did at an affordable price. Personally, I'm not a fan of having too many vendors working on the same pieces as this can lead to fragmentation.

Business wise this was likely a good deal for Will (the owner of AM) so there is no sense crucifying him for making it after all, business is business. It raises a real concern about the DNN ecosystem, the smaller or non-profit site owners relying on the Community edition as their starting point to the world-wide-web. Considering there is no mid-tier DNN product offering that have any level of support, the gap just got widened by this acquisition. It just seems over the past few years that DNN has become all about the money, and less about its roots. I know, I know, but you can't abandon the girl that brought you to the dance either. DNN has always had work to do in customer loyalty, and as the gap between site owners that have deep pockets and those who don't grows, the task gets more difficult.