I have always liked Graffiti. Even before they had officially announced support for VistaDB I was a fan of the design and liked the fact that it was a commercial product.
I was tired of having to manually patch other blog software all the time, keep track of their latest exploits, patches, etc and really just wanted a product that I could use and it would take care of itself.
Community wants the product
The amazing thing is that after the lack of product development customers still support Graffiti. The community actually wants the product to succeed. In a very well thought out post about the situation Lee Dumond makes an impassioned plea for Telligent to Open Source Graffiti to allow the community to embrace it.
Despite all that’s happened, there are still lots of us out here that want to see Graffiti succeed in one form or another. I strongly believe that if Telligent were to throw the Graffiti code base up on CodePlex tomorrow, there would be dozens, if not hundreds, of developers all over it within hours. Within a week or two we’d be seeing some serious code commits. Inside of a month most of the important but still-missing features will have been implemented. And going forward, Graffiti would be well positioned to take its place as the de facto .NET CMS solution.
I don't know if that many people would be willing to work on the project at this point, but it is a very interesting argument. Perhaps a multiple license version where there is an Open version, and a Closed supported version. Of course that only works when the majority of the work comes from the company, if the community takes off with it they will not tolerate all that work going back into a closed version lightly.
Telligent should be doing everything they can to embrace these passionate developers from their community. They don't seem to understand how lucky they are that people are even taking the time to post and fight for Graffiti. Community is a rare thing to build, and once it goes sour it rarely comes back. I think they are blowing a fantastic opportunity, but that is just my opinion.
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