The last 7 years has been a very exciting time for the DotNetNuke team.  This period has been marked by constant change.  Sometimes the changes were positive and helped move the project forward, and other times the changes did not achieve the desired results and thus became a learning opportunity.  During this period we have had almost 80 core team members and project leads, had 5 major releases, hosted the project on 3 different open source websites, had 3 different project forums, and used 3 different source code management systems (hat tip to the reader who can name the websites and SCMs) .  We have also launched a company, created a commercial version of the project, and hosted conferences in North America and Europe.  All in all, it has been a pretty busy time, marked by lots of changes.  There have been 3 constants throughout the life of the project – Shaun Walker has always been the leader of the project, DotNetNuke has always been offered under a BSD open source license (we’ll conveniently ignore Shaun’s brief flirtation with a different license in 2003), and we have always operated a closed repository.  Today I am happy to announce that one of those is changing.

In his recent post on Configuring the Stack, Jeff Atwood discusses the frustration that comes with installing a complete development environment. 

I'm having a hard time seeing how Microsoft's commercial stack is any easier to configure than the alternative open source stacks these days. Either the open source stuff has gotten a lot more streamlined and mature, or the Microsoft stuff is somehow devolving into complexity. I'm not sure which it is, exactly, but the argument that choosing a commercial development stack saves you time rings more and more hollow over time.

You can read through the comments and see that...

It seems that I am seeing more and more discussion around what constitutes Open Source software and Open Source projects.  Not only do you have the Free Software group who follow the Richard Stallman philosophy and the Open Source group who fall more into the Eric Raymond camp, but lately though you have a number of people for whom...