I started writing a comment on Phil Sturgeon’s blog post from yesterday, but as my comment grew longer and longer, I felt that it would be better presented as a post on my own blog. I would encourage you to read the post and the comments that follow before diving into my post here, as the context will be valuable in understanding my response.

Also before I move into my commentary, I want to make it abundantly clear that I am encouraged by some of the conversation that has taken place since the initial outcry. Things are certainly not resolved yet, but I do see a glimmer of hope.

My Response

I must say I was taken aback by some of the responses early on to Phil’s post. The negativity from both sides was disheartening, and I know this was not Phil’s intent.

I for one am a huge fan of CodeIgniter, and I know that many of the developers in the CI are as well. I do share in the frustration and disappointment that many others express, though, but it’s only in hopes of seeing change. If I had already lost all hope in the product, I would have abandoned ship much earlier on, and I wouldn’t be writing this response. I think that’s the sentiment that Phil shared as well, though it may not have been taken that way.

Our desire is not to jump ship, but instead to see continued awesomeness from the framework we’ve all loved for so long.

The one thing I wish could be clarified from all the commentary, especially that from those who work at EllisLab is this:

We’ve consistently heard that EllisLab invested lots of money in a framework that doesn’t make them a dime. We know you’ve invested heavily in the framework. And we’re VERY grateful for that. But why ISN’T it making you money?

But, it’s the second part of that I guess I don’t fully understand. I don’t see why EllisLab does not draw value from their open source offering. Why is CodeIgniter CHARITY and not indirect PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT?

As a business owner myself, doing something for the good of the cause is great, but not if it’s going to be a hindrance to my bottom line. That why I wouldn’t create a free product just to be a good will offering, something that I wouldn’t use myself. I would create a product that I use myself to better my business AS WELL as the community. The thing is, companies have made millions of dollars from their products that are based on open source projects that they sponsor.

Of course I don’t understand the inner workings of the company, but from my perspective, investing in CodeIgniter does not take away resources from your commercial offering. On the contrary, I would hope that every feature added to the framework by the community would be code that you can use as you develop ExpressionEngine, perhaps even eventually REDUCING development costs for ExpressionEngine. It’s an indirect connection, but for me it’s simple to see.

Conclusion

My conclusion is simple. I love CodeIgniter and I love ExpressionEngine. I’m an active user of both, on almost every project I do. I want to see the best for both.

It’s not and easy road or a short one, but in the end, I think the only way that you can successfully foster both communities is to put your FAITH in CodeIgniter, not just as charity, but as a core for ExpressionEngine. Set a roadmap that supports your ExpressionEngine roadmap. Let the community contribution help you be even more successful than you already are with fewer resources.

You have two great products, but one is always going to suffer if you don’t allow them support eachother in a much greater way than they already do.

Thank you for reading. And I do hope that you can see the positive mindset I have on this issue. This post is not here to spawn further attacks, but rather to catalyze EllisLab to re-envision their products in a way that benefits THEM and the COMMUNITY.

I’ve noticed two threads of discussion happening surrounding the addons we’re creating, selling and supporting, and I’m finding both of these discussions to be a bit discouraging. So I write this post- a rationale of why and how we do what we as well as a plea for your support.

The first discussion revolves around the question, “Why do you charge for all of your addons?”

From my perspective, commercial addons are the ideal solution for a commercial product such as MojoMotor. While it may come across that we just want to cash in on a new market, for me  at least the rationale is deeper than that.

As a web developer using ExpressionEngine for my clients, I often need the functionality provided by addons. I am given a choice when I start the project, either I can build all of the functionality myself, or I can purchase someone else’s addon and use it. There is also the third option of finding a free alternative.

I normally choose to purchase a commercial addon. Why?

In either the case of building my own or using someone’s free alternative, I lose support for the addon. If I build it myself, I have to support it. A free addon may have support, but there’s no guarantee of how long it will be available, how attentive the developer will be, etc.

When I’m charging customers thousands of dollars for a website, I don’t want to be taking that kind of risk to my credibility. If something isn’t working, I need to be able to get in contact with someone who knows what they’re doing. Sure I could dig through the code and figure it out myself, but that’s a waste of both my time and the customer’s money. That’s why I use a commercial CMS like ExpressionEngine, and stick with commercial addons to add functionality.

In the same vein, the addons I and other MojoAddons developers are selling come with support. That’s where the price comes into play. Most of us wouldn’t mind contributing a small piece of code to the community to help people out, and both Dan and Phil have done this, but the influx of support requests makes it unreasonable to do this for our larger and more complicated products. It just comes down to a matter of time—donating maybe two or three hours to the cause is one thing, but the unending hours of e-mail support add up and take us away from our other priorities.

Support is the main reason why we charge for our addons.

Along this same line of thinking, I just want to remind our customers that you shouldn’t hesitate to contact us for support. In the MojoAddons download center, and e-mail is provided for support of each of the products you’ve purchased. You’ve paid for our support, so please don’t hesitate to use it.

We’ve had a lot of great reactions to our addons, and we’re excited about that. But a few bugs have cropped up here and there, and I’d encourage you to contact us for help when you do find a problem, rather than trying to fix it yourself. In the end it’ll help make our products better, and it’ll help us help other users of our addons.

The second discussion I’ve become aware of surrounds the development of free alternatives to the addons we’re selling.

Firstly, I’m all about supporting the community. EllisLab is known for fostering active, friendly and helpful communities of users surrounding its products. It’s one of the reasons it’s so great to work with CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine and now MojoMotor. I just want to get that out of the way to begin with. In no way do I condemn the creation of community code and addons for the good of everyone.

What I do condemn is blatant imitation of commercial addons. I’m certainly no intellectual property expert, and I don’t really want to dive into legal battles. But the reality is, there have been several free addons released that clearly have a basis in the functionality my colleagues and I have envisioned and built.

It’s discouraging to see this, tearing down the hard work we’ve done and the support which we’ve committed to offer.

A lot of thinking, preparation, development time and testing has gone into creating the products we sell. And we’re proud of what we’ve done, creating, hopefully, easy-to-use tools for MojoMotor users.

I totally support the creation of free alternatives, as long as they don’t duplicate the functionality of our addons with nearly-identical syntax, etc.

While I don’t have any recourse for this situation, I want to try and turn this around to have a positive outcome. There are GREAT developers out there now, working hard and fast to create everything the MojoMotor users wish and hope for in addon software.  So, instead of condemning these actions I’m going to call them to a greater cause:

As software developers in a great community with a brand new product, I encourage every developer to INNOVATE. Sure the other MojoAddons developers and I have had some pretty awesome ideas thus far, but the community can no move forward if we simply continue to rebuild the same addons in small iterations. The MojoMotor users are calling out for the features they want to see.

Regardless of whether you choose to release your addons for free or commercially, we developers are problem solvers. And trust me, there are plenty of problems out there to solve. So get out there, do it. Don’t let the ideas I or my colleagues have created hold you back to an idea of how your addons should work.

We are a community, and I am glad that EllisLab is committed to organizing its users in this way. I encourage everyone here to respect the creations others have come up with, continue to build up the products we love with equally awesome addons and lastly to work together, not against each other, to bring MojoMotor to new levels of functionality that will benefit everyone.

In no particular order, except that which they came out of my mind and into my fingers:

• Switched my blog over to use Disqus for comments. I’ve seen it used elsewhere, and I like the idea of integrating my blog with Twitter and Facebook. I don’t really get a lot of comments here anyway, so we’ll see how it goes. I did have one issue with the WordPress plugin for Disqus, thought. The import function, which is supposed to copy all your existing WordPress comments to Disqus did not work. If anyone has any ideas on what could be wrong, let me know. Everything looked good and it says it did it, they just never show up.
• Started playing with MongoDB. I’ve been hearing a lot about the NoSQL style databases, as we all have, and I’ve been curious about using them. MongoDB had fairly good documentation and looked like a pretty simple PHP implementation, so I choose it over some of the other options. I ended up using the 10gen packages for Ubuntu/Debian to install Mongo on my servers. You might note that the packages only support Ubuntu 9.04+.
• In the process of installing Mongo, I managed to bork my one server pretty bad, so I restored from a backup and created a new one for testing. After getting a testing server up I decided to take a big giant step and install Ruby on Rails to get started experimenting with it a bit more than I have previously. Until now, I’ve avoided it, as I don’t enjoy the copious use of command-line tools that are involved in Rails development and deployment. I’ve been known to call Rails proponent ‘commies,’ because of its highly-automated scripts. Luckily, in the last few months, as I’ve gotten used to running my own Ubuntu servers, I’ve become a lot more comfortable with the command line. So, I felt like it was time to give it another try. I installed Passenger in Apache, so it’s all set to go.
• After getting Mongo and Rails setup on a new cloudserver, I decided to make sure I could do it all over again. Being able to replicate my setup is pretty key to me, so I downloaded a copy of VirtualBox and dove into the world of virtualization, as well. So far so good; I now have a very similar Ubuntu 9.10 server running locally within VirtualBox. It seems like Virtualization has come a long way since I last used Parallels on my Mac. I always found that the virtual machine would bog down the rest of the system so much that it made the system fairly unusable. It doesn’t seem to be the case with the latest generation of virtualization software. It really makes me wonder about setting up a virtual cluster of servers somewhere… cuz you know, I need that much power.
• Client work out the ears. I incorporated my own development firm, Conflux Group, Inc., in January, and since then I’ve been quite busy doing client work. I feel like I’m off to a good start, having plenty of work to keep me busy every week, but I still would like to expand my client base, so as not to put all my eggs in one basket.
• New lens for my SLR. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I finally went ahead and got myself a new lens for my Olympus E-500 DSLR. It’s a bit of an odd camera, not too common, so lenses are a bit hard to come by. I settled on a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens. The results are beautiful, even with my lack of photography ninja skills.

That’s most everything for now. I hope to have more to say about my experiences with MongoDB and Ruby on Rails as I dig in further.

One final note. If you’re a CodeIgniter or ExpressionEngine person, you should definitely consider coming to EECI2010 in San Francisco this May. I’ll be there, along with my posse of nerdy counterparts hailing from all over. It should be a great time, and I’m really looking forward to it.

1. Give Hashtag.it a serious upgrade. This includes a more refined design and new features.
2. Start building the Twitter management tool that I’ve been dreaming about. I can’t manage my 400+ followees, and I don’t want to cut anyone. I’m determined to make it work with some code-magic.
3. Read a bunch of books. I’ve got a stack a mile high of books I want to read, but I never feel like reading them.

I can’t say I’m really surprised, or that I feel bad for the students who stupidly believed that a for-profit company such as the one that runs University Crossings, would really be looking out for their best interest.

Word to the wise for students dealing with landlords.. keep good records and pay attention to what’s going on… 

The article is located here, for those who might like to read it.

this global change in perspective seems to be taking a toll on me. when i spend only moments disconnected from the “network,” i feel a longing for it. i’m afraid to miss something: the latest news, places to go, a better option.

even the things i used to find fulfilling, occupying myself in a solitary fashion, leave me afraid that i’ll be passing up something.

i hate this. i feel chained. and why do i have to be constant connected to gain any sort of fulfillment. of course, i’m sure it’s fallacious anyway.

i feel like such a rebel when i reject the trend. if i stay home, or sleep through the day, or ignore my mobile phone’s persistent hum, i get a bleak smirk of accomplishment on my face.  what have i accomplished? to escape the system, i have to forgo the things i once loved. and in the end, have i really escaped? if they wanted to find me,  they could. because i’ve been here all along.