We have yet to make a public statement about Active Social simply because we are not sure of which or if all of the features will be in the community edition, nor when it will be officially released. Also, while Active Social has certainly been a competitor, our modules have been around longer and are certainly more robust than their offering. However, I have attached a document to this reply that shows the differences of the main modules that we are aware of. You also need to consider that we have many more modules that perform functionality that is not included in the attached document.

Indeed, we have spent an enormous amount of time on our products. We have been building these modules for about 6 years now, if you count the previous company we were all involved with (Venexus). I remember having a conversation with Will Morgenweck in 2008, shortly after he purchased DNN Fusion (the original source of what became Active Social) and discussing how we had become competitors. We released our commercial version of our software before he even switched the code over to reference his company. When we switched from Venexus to VivoWare, we went open source with all of our modules, and this definitely put a damper on their sales. I cannot tell you how many people came to us simply because we were more open to modifying and customizing our modules than Active Modules. While Active Social is a great product, I think it is kind of obvious why Active Modules sold the company to DotNetNuke.

One thing to consider is that now that DotNetNuke owns Active Social is how often it will actually be updated. I remember from the first DNN Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas in 2007, they announced they were going to make DNN social. They finally released their user profile a couple of years later, but there was not really anything social about it. Even since Active Modules was purchased, we were told it would be in the 6.0 version, then 6.1, and now 6.2? It’s 2012 in a few days and we are still waiting. So, even if it is released, how often do you really think they will be releasing new features or updates? We already have more features and I can guarantee that we will be more active with our releases and new features than DNN will be. I can only imagine that the innovation of Active Social will slow down to a crawl, simply because this is not their true focus. VivoWare IS social software and this is all we do. Worst case, we may finally have some competition that leads to more innovation.

As far as your concern that VivoWare could collapse, that is certainly understandable. However, our source code is available on CodePlex and would be available even if the company disappeared. What I can tell you is that we have no plans to sell or close our company at this time. We have been around for a long time in the DNN community and plan on being here for many more years to come.