From what I understand, the modules will only be available to Professional and Elite Edition customer. While I have never purchased either of those modules, it seems that quite a few people have and are upset that they will no longer have access to download updates or purchase these modules from SnowCovered. Now, they must shell out a couple thousand dollars to access these modules again. Here is a thread in the forums about it:

 

I will not mention any names, but a few 3^rd party module vendors are also upset about this acquisition. I can see why to some degree, but here is my take on it…

 

Let’s face it, DotNetNuke has received funding, twice now, from Vulture Capitalist. The entire business model has changed in the past year with the Professional and Elite offering. DotNetNuke must acquire new customers for these products in order to show profits to the VCs. In order to acquire these customers, there needs to be big differences between the Community (aka FREE offering) and the Professional and Elite version. Buying 3^rd party modules makes sense for multiple reasons, but mainly because it is a quick way to add new functionality to their product offerings without all of the development required to build their own from scratch.

 

Personally, I have no issue with this, but then again, I have never purchased those modules, so I have no vested interest, so I will not discuss how this affects the end users of those modules. However, I think this acquisition actually helps a couple of 3^rd party vendors. For example, with the Open-DocumentLibrary off the market, this opens up new opportunities for document management module vendors. For example, I would assume that the Document Exchange modules from Bring2Mind would benefit from this. Also, with Open-SearchEngine off the module market, I would assume that more people will be using our Search Engine modules, after all they are open source and FREE.

 

Since I do have a vested interest in Search since we offer this as a product, I really see this acquisition as a benefit to VivoWare. While we no longer sell modules on SnowCovered, for several reasons, having more people downloading and using our open source modules equates to more custom development and DNN support, which has always been our main source of revenue. And, now there really are no other decent options out there in my opinion, and certainly none with as many features and social integration that we have with our modules. The Open-SearchEngine uses/used DotLucene.Net for crawling and indexing, which is really antiquated technology. Competing with DotNetNuke for this module market is fairly easy when comparing our features and technology to what they will have in the Professional and Elite edition.

 

So, what does this mean to me? Not much. We have seen 3^rd party module development companies come and go over the years, and if DotNetNuke starts buying more modules from the developer community, it just mean less competition for us. We will still develop new and innovative features and functionality for our modules and clients that outperform the available features in DotNetNuke.