Sadly, the progress of Connections seems to be still slowly. One of the reasons is that CNX is proprietary software, traditionally developed by the owning company (HCL). Why don't you open source it on GitHub or GitLab and take the power of the community?
OS is continously growing and doesn't automatically mean that it couldn't generate money. Rather there are companys having a solid busioness model build on open source like RedHat, Oracle (MySQL), Elasticsearch, Kubernetes (Google) to just name a few, there are many more. Even Microsoft opened their "holy" .NET Framework already in 2016.
HCL could follow this model and for example charge customers for support or hosting. It's also possible to start by just open sourcing the core and selling some additional components.
This could speed up the development massively because everyone in the connections community could directly help to improve the project, instead of being limited to the developers working at HCL. As a OS fan, I'd also contribute with mainly skills in DevOps, Java, C#/(ASP:NET) Core, Docker, Kubernetes and Linux and already did some development around CNX like Ansible playbooks, a custom theme and more. I guess that I'm not alone and other would contribute their skills and knowledge too, like it's daily business in a lot of OS projects. It would also bring additional features to CNX cause not other products are OS, especially those from the Microsoft competition.
I already suggested this to touchpoint in 2018, cause we needed to customize TP heavily and I'd like to contributed this officially so that every user could profit of it. Sadly my idea from 2018 is still at the state of under consideration without any feedback. I see this still as an good idea, but since 2021 CNX has to catch up even more, I think it's too late to play with such small projects and you should consider to open source as much as possible to use this chance instead of waiting until more and more customers migrate.
@Rene That is sad to hear. I agree that this is a fundamental shift, but I see a lot of benefits - especially on a long term base.
What about a compromise to start with just some components? I think this is simpler than open sourcing the entire CNX stack and you can start collecting experience. I already made suggestions for single componens like Touchpoint, which was posted in a seperated idea here.
A lot of factors would go into making this fundamental shift and while I am not disputing that the speed of development can always be improved, making all of Connections availably as Open Source is very unlikley to happen.
*connections
Would be awesome if connection is not a black box the future is open software