In an nutshell the plan is to do 1 or 2 releases that tighten up the existing code base in 2009. We won’t do too many drastic things as there doesn’t appear to be a need based on the community feedback. There are some things here and there, but overall the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
What does it mean in the not-so-near term? Well, dashCommerce is going to move towards an enterprise solution. What does that mean? It means a lot of things, but mainly it means we are going big. Huge. Enormous. 
Why are we going to do that? Because my spidey sense is tingling. And I’ve been fortunate enough to see things recently that I have not seen before and the end result of that is a focus on going enterprise with dashCommerce. The enterprise edition will also have a more liberal licensing model – the kind that makes developers happy. More on that to come.
We are also going to focus on making Mono a first class, supported platform for dashCommerce. What does that mean? It means dashCommerce will be cross-platform: Windows, Linux, OS X, and BSD. Why? Well, we need a broader base and being able to run only on Windows is a limiting factor. It’s the same reason people program in Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. – they can run anywhere. Will this piss off Microsoft? Dunno. I doubt it, since they made it possible. I think we will also see a huge upside from a community that is well experienced and entrenched in the open source world as we bring in developers from the Linux world. (fingers crossed)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the direction we are taking and if you have any pointers, I’d love to hear those as well.
Oh, one last thing, I want to make the engineering of dashCommerce v.Next very transparent, so I want to do some screencasts as we move through the process. I’d like you to be a part of that. I’m looking for a broad range of talent, skill, etc. So if you think you have something to contribute, let me know and we can set something up. If you are interested in sponsoring the development of dashCommerce v.Next, please drop me a note here or send me an email or PM me in the dashCommerce forums (user id chris.cyvas).
Onward and Upward! 
