Good news came in this week. It has been in the air for some time and those of you who've attended OpenForce have surely heard rumors about this. DNN has raised venture capital (I'm not a silicon valley resident, so the 'series A' label threw me off). This means a group of investors came to the conclusion that their money would probably make more money by injecting it into DotNetNuke Corp. Given the fact that we're talking Open Source software and we're in an economic downturn, I'd say this is quite something the corp have managed to pull off here. It makes you wonder where they took those guys in Vegas. But seriously, DNN is of course quickly finding its way into businesses of all sizes. And the economic downturn is probably a blessing in disguise as CTOs are looking for cheaper alternatives for their web-based applications.
So how does this affect us? Well for a start the corp will be able to hire more manpower to develop the framework. This means faster development and more release cycles per year. We have all been yearning for this. 2008 saw many distractions and as a result DNN 5 has been severely delayed. Now managers can stick to managing and developers can stick to developing.
Related to this I foresee hiring people to do those things which are hard to get off the ground in an Open Source project. I'm thinking about better and more complete documentation, usability studies, and graphics professionals, among others.
Another advantage that impacts our business is the corp's ability to splurge on marketing now. You can never have enough visibility or growth. The more installations there are out there, the better this is for the eco-system like Bring2mind or the countless companies delivering solutions based on DNN.
For more advantages also check out Chris Hammond's blog on this. I guess champagne glasses are being raised across the eco-system and I'm sure I'll hear more tonight during our core team chat. For now, back to work ...