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The question of Oqtane vs DNN has come up numerous times in recent months.
The question of Oqtane vs DNN has come up numerous times in recent months. In general it seems that people are trying to understand the rationale behind creating a completely new open source project as opposed to evolving the existing DNN project. In order to answer this question it is helpful to step back in time and review the events which got us to where we are today.
Back in 2012 while I was still CTO at DNN Corp, we recognized that adoption of the DNN platform was declining and we identified a variety of factors which we believed were responsible for the decrease. One of the top items on the list was related to technology trends and the fact that DNN was no longer considered to be modern or relevant amongst Microsoft software developers. As a result I created an internal company proposal titled "DNN Platform Revolution: An Application Framework For The Next 10 Years". It was a vision on how to transform the DNN platform into an application framework for the future. Although it was authored 7 years ago, it contained many of the architectural approaches which are considered to be enterprise best practices today such as separation of client and server concerns, a proper API services layer, etc... It also included a product strategy which advocated building a completely new platform from scratch which eliminated the legacy constraints of the existing DNN platform but still retained all of its key strengths and differentiators. The proposal received a lot of attention internally but ultimately the leadership of DNN Corp made a decision to not move forward with this approach and instead opted to focus on maintaining and enhancing the existing platform.