UPDATE: As you can see in the comments from Rob Howard and David Burke of Telligent, they have explained that the licensing terminology expressed in the Daily News is not a reflection of the final final wording of the licensing. In fact, this is still a work in progress on their part and they are throwing around some much more acceptable ideas (such as a cap on the Personal Edition of $500/mo.). Now this isn't finalized either, but I do appreciate Rob and Dave taking the time to comment on my post and for the continued thoughtful discussion going on at Telligent on this matter.

    It was perhaps around the spring of 2006 that I installed and began using this wonderful new system called Community Server. Designed by Telligent it had rocketed to fame in part because of its widespread adoption by Microsoft as the forum/blog host of choice. It offered an Express Edition which had some annoying limitations, but still was rather full-featured for a free product. It also happened to be an ASP.NET 2.0 product - something which I was eager to embrace, as opposed to say a PHP or CGI based CMS.

    Anyways, I've been using it happily for some months now and have been extremely excited about the upcoming CS 3.0 with its more full-featured CMS. Today, however, my hopes were dashed to the ground with the "Daily News" RSS feed I receive from Telligent. It noted that they had changed the name of the "Express" edition to the "Personal" edition and furthermore this change in naming reflected a change in licensing. Companies were no longer allowed to use the Express/Personal edition, except for evaluation. Individuals were no longer allowed to use it if they made any money off of it - e.g. Google Adsense.

    This is, in my opinion, a very saddening move on Telligent's part. Telligent has the right to do whatever they want with their software and to demand whatever price they desire for its use. I am just disappointed that they have chosen to go this route. I love their software - but especially at this point, I am a hobbyist. I try to make money, but I don't make much. Someday I had hoped to make enough that upgrading to one of the better versions would make sense, but now my hand is forced and if I want to upgrade to a newer version I have to spend extra money.

    I honestly don't know what I will do. I may see how hard it would be to port the site over to something like DotNetNuke. Though I hope I don't have to. I may also consider biting the bullet and upgrading to a standard license. I looked over the EULA that came with the software and noted that there was no mention that future licenses would act retroactively on past licensing, so my layperson's understanding of the licensing is that unless I upgrade I will continue to operate under the old licensing - which retains the ideal of "expressness" and allows for commercial usage of the express edition.

    That's fine with me for now, I'm not too interested in any of the patches until they hit 3.0. But then what will I do? I don't want to be stuck with an obsolete technology. On the other hand, $299 is a pretty hefty chunk of change...Especially for hobbyists.