Sueetie - The Future in .NET Open Source Online Community Development
Dave Burke is one of the most respectful men who I’ve ever seen on the community, and I think that there are many other community friends who can agree with me on this. Dave has been working as a freelance .NET developer for the past years, and he also worked for Telligent as a Community Evangelist for almost a year. In the rest of the years, he has been a freelancer specializing in online .NET communities, and he spent much time on Community Server as well.
In the past few months we’ve been in touch regarding some personal stuff, but as a marginal topic, we also talked about his upcoming project that targets open source movement for online .NET communities. He told me about his idea to merge some free open source projects and integrate them with a core membership system to have a cheap yet powerful option for community building.
A few hours ago, Dave announced his project called Sueetie which is available with a very beautiful theme on its own domain with an open license. Sueetie has a manifesto that describes its goals and roadmap very well.
By the way, Sueetie is an open source community engine that merges some projects such as BlogEngine.NET, YetAnotherForum.NET, Gallery Server Pro, and ScrewTurn Wiki together. These open source options are integrated in a single package using WAST that provides constant membership administration to all the sub-systems.
As you see, Dave has done such a great job in implementing the project and making it open source. Doubtlessly, Sueetie is a free and excellent open source option for those who want to build online communities but can’t afford expensive licenses.
The first thing that may have come to your mind after reading the announcement is that Sueetie is going to do something similar to Community Server, and you may be right to some extent. Sueetie is offering the same major features as Community Server offers by applying open source alternatives, but of course, it cannot offer the high level of integrity and modern features that Community Server provides. In fact, Sueetie is a movement towards an alternative for those who want these features in a lower level and don’t want to pay for licenses. Honestly, Community Server licenses have become expensive, and year after year, they’re increasing to target more professional scenarios. Many customers do like to pay less for their projects, so it’s logical to have an invention to fill the gap here. The weakness of individual open source projects is that they are not integrated very well, but now Dave has done the job to offer an integration of these individual projects.
However, any assertion that Sueetie and Community Server are competitors looks like a silly statement that we can only find on the .NET community. This is the software development, and it’s a matter of a fact that software business mandates a wide range of options for different requirements and financial capabilities. There are many operating systems each with its own set of editions. There are too many source control software each with different features and commercial model. Commercial requirements lead to different products and it’s always a market for any product that can add something to this game.
In the end, I hope that Dave succeeds with his new project and I’m sure he will. Sueetie is a great addition to the community at this point, and I’m almost sure that it will help many developers.
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6 Comments : 12.19.08
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Keyvan, Thank you so much for taking the time to write up this excellent post. It served as a better announcement for Sueetie than mine did! :-)
I appreciate your perspective on the place of Sueetie in the online community product space. You're right about that. I am not seeking to be a competitor to any .NET commercial product, but I AM committed to providing individuals and small businesses with affordable .NET-based options.
Thanks again for the write-up. You're a great friend.
@Dave
You're welcome, man :-) I really enjoyed your work on Sueetie.
And I'm also glad that you have such an excellent goal for the future of the project among .NET developers.
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It looks like that the latest days of the year allures more people to launch new sites. After Sueetie launched by Dave Burke , now it’s Hamid Shojaee ’s turn to launch another great site called About Scrum which specializes in the area of project management
You should have noticed that earlier than myself but it took a while for me to realize that recently
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Sueetie - The Future in .NET Open Source Online Community Development
12.19.2008 @ 5:07 AM
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