We are entering the "DNN Forge era"

I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to see new projects added to the DNN Forge every day. I believe that these projects will drive the direction of DotNetNuke and bring more users (and developers) to the community.

In my mind we have had these Era's:

• "Snowcovered Era" - A lot of DNN modules were made available so people used DNN simply because you could easily buy the code you needed.
• "The Marketplace Era" - Finally you had higher standards to meet the needs of large companies and enterprise deployments.

With the "DNN Forge Era" I believe we will have projects that will be maintained by multiple developers. This will allow projects to produce modules that may truly be surprising. With the "for profit" model companies either become large like Engage or they stay small. The vast majority stay small.

With the "Open Source" model a project can become large without the need to pay salaries or other overhead. The product is easy to market because it's free. Instead of competition you end up with more team members.

For example, IWeb started with a simple module I made. Currently it is the largest DNN Forge project and this week I stepped down as the leader of the project (Ian Lackey  is now the project leader. I continue to server as co-leader) because the project simply "outgrew me".  The IWeb project now has 2 DNN Forge projects: IWeb (uses .asmx web services) and IWebCF (uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)).

This is the model that gave rise to the DotNetNuke community. And look how that turned out...