UPDATED: May 4th, 2007.
In December of 2006 I wrote an article complaining about Telligent's new shocking scheme as reflected in a blog on their website. I was happily surprised by the personal responses I received from Rob Howard and David Burke of Telligent, as well as being mentioned in their daily news. There explanations of the licensing scheme gave me hope for my continued ability to use CS 2.1 at that time. Now with the release of CS 2007 and the again updated licensing scheme, I speak out once again, with high hopes that others will join me.
I use two main forms of CMS to run my websites, along with writing non-CMS based sites occasionally. My personal blogs are currently in CS 2.1, that is the blog you are reading right now. I also have forums setup, but nobody really uses them. I use DotNetNuke for a number of websites including my personal website - davemackey.net, my youth group's website (nomadsyouth.com), and my church's website (calvarycommunitypenndel.org). I've actually shifted heavily away from CS. Why? It didn't have to do with licensing, actually it had to do with the complexity of skinning and the complexity of creating additional content pages.
That's not to say my move has been wholehearted by any means. CS's interface has always been much more streamlined, web 2.0, and aesthetically pleasing than the default themes of DNN Furthermore, CS loads many times faster than DNN - in my subjective opinion. Still, with the release of 4.4.1 and 4.5 additional improvements were made in DNN's load time, and because of it's open source nature I hope that sometime in the near future I might have the opportunity to check around the source myself and see if there is a way to make a super-lite edition of DNN that will still be able to extend to include all the normal functionality.
Still, I have been eagerly looking forward to CS 2007. With its new theming engine and the possibility (I don't know whether it was included) of a more full-fledged CMS approach, I figured it could overtake DNN for me. However, right now there are two paramount issues that are confronting me:
1. Licensing - I understand that there is a need for companies such as Telligent to monetize their product, and I really felt that they had come to a good compromise by stating that those using Community Server who had revenues over x per month had to purchase the software. But in this new licensing scheme, they once again cripple this offer. While they still have the $500 per month cap they have also stated that if the organization is a corporate entity rather than an individual or non-profit, the site cannot be publicly facing.
My question is - why this limitation? I really think there is a better way to do this. How? By reducing the per month cap. Rather than stating, "corporations cannot have a public facing website" why not lower the cap significantly? What about $250/mo.? What about $100/mo.? I just realized as I wrote this that the concern may also be that many corporations do not directly monetize their websites. For example, let's say a company sells Widgets (in the old-fashioned sense, not the new Yahoo/Google sense). I may want to offer forums where my consumers can talk about their favorite Widgets, blogs where they can learn about the latest weightless widgets my company is creating, photo galleries of our favorite widget uses, and file libraries with all the latest research on widgets. There might not be a single ad on any of these pages - so the site would not derive revenue.
Okay, this is a bit harder, and I am guessing this is where the real dilemma arises. In this instance perhaps the licensing should get two variations:
(a) If the website is advertising supported revenue cannot exceed x per month.
(b) If the website serves as a conduit for customer support, information, and relational building pageviews cannot exceed x per month.
Perhaps even this is too complex, and in this case I think it would probably be okay to just require non-advertising revenue based businesses to pay for a commercial license, because they have a business model that CS is supporting. In the case of advertising-based businesses, however, CS is the model.
To summarize. I think there needs to be an important distinction between advertising supported models and non-advertising supported models. A model where advertising is the main form of revenue and a model where a product or service is the main form of revenue.
2. Migration Path - As far as I can tell, and from what I have read in the past, there is no migration route from CS 2.1 to CS 2007. I understand that major changes have occurred, but I think there needs to be a migration path for at least the contents (not the themes) - e.g. blogs, forums, files, image galleries. Why? Because otherwise its just as easy for me to write a script that converts CS 2.1 content into DNN 4.5 content as to write one to convert CS 2.1 to CS 2007.
I was entirely wrong on this point. I am not sure where I read about the migration issues and whether I misunderstood what the writer was representing or whether the writer misunderstood Telligent's position, but CS 2007 is very easily upgradeable. I have successfully upgraded CS 2.1 to CS 2007 by running a SQL script and replacing the 2.1 files with 2007 files. It was a cinch.
Conclusions:
At this time I feel that Telligent has an excellent product, but that they are being severely rivaled by DotNetNuke. The DNN platform has taken large strides toward erasing the most significant differences between DNN and CS in its latest releases. These new features include significant performance enhancements as well as support for AJAX which gives a much more web 2.0 feel.
Telligent must make a choice to support small developers - unconditional of whether they are individuals or businesses if they hope to remain competitive with DNN. Microsoft has taken this approach with its products, and I know that this has been a significant factor in my utilization of their products personally.
As a small developer I have been using Visual Web Developer Express, SQL Server 2005 Express, etc. However, in my corporate environment Microsoft can then count on me to enter their corporate products into the discussion because they are what I am familiar with, skilled with, and as my skillset grows and perhaps someday I launch a product that is successful - they can trust that I will continue to use their products, upgrading to corporate products as needed as opposed to transferring to foreign technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Java, Oracle, etc.
As small developers we are no longer cornered with no choice. One can leave Microsoft for LAMP. One can leave one ISP for another. The multitude of vendors for applications and services is infinite. I personally, and I am sure many others like me, prefer opener licensing over more closed licensing, and will oftentimes default to the opener licensing even in the face of a slightly inferior featureset in order to avoid the complications of a closed license.
Final Note:
A recent DNN blog post promised a revamped blogging system in the near future. This along with performance enhancements will continue to bring DNN closer to CS. If DNN can implement some better skins they will have moved a long way towards perfection. For example, if they can get Dynnamite to include the Free Skin pack they will just have taken leaps in the right direction.
Update: DNN still has a long ways to go in the performance department.