Thread

I have considered the new stance of Ellis Labs/CodeIgniter and decided that there is no longer any profit for me in giving FREE SUPPORT to their customers so they might be successful.

I understand that Ellis Labs is a business that needs to make a profit. I know that they will understand that I also run a business that has the same need.

They may keep the 400+ answers I have added to their Knowledge Base at no charge. I have no plans at the moment to remove my open source libraries or CodeIgniter tutorials I offer their customers, but retain the right to do so at my leisure.

I had been considering learning another popular framework to increase my marketability but did not have the time; now, instead of the time I had intended to spend over the holidays on a short series of tutorials on debugging common CI problems,  which make up the bulk of the forum questions, and adding to two libraries I have been using but feel need some work, I will use my time for my own needs so as to increase my own bottom line.

Other developers who frequent these forums are, of course, free to make their own decisions about what is important to them, but personally I would advise you that your relationship with EllisLabs/CI is now that of a business to business nature, and you should consider if the time you are donating to a FOR PROFIT business might not be better spent serving your own personal growth or some other Open Source community, of which there are many hundreds.

To those of you of have built up a relationship with over the last three and half years - I’m not dead 😊 . Come visit some time & tell me what new things you’re up to.

Having a for profit business behind CI is one of its strongest points. I dont understand your bitterness, were you expecting to be paid or compensated in some way for posting on the forums? People have all different kinds of motivations for making open source software, or answering questions on boards. But almost everything we are doing in the open source world, completely relies on a commercial enterprise somewhere. Thats actually part of why open source is so cool - just like codeigniter.

Ellis Labs has taken the stance of wanting to “internalize potential consulting revenue”. I have seen this with other software companies I have worked for in the past; I have sat in meetings where this sort of thing was planned out and implemented.

The marketing people involved are not cognizant of how incredibly important Goodwill is to an Open source product - anyone can write a good framework in a relatively short period of time.  CI was built up because of the community effort.

Open source contributors do so for a variety of reasons - altruism, self-ego (wanting to be recognized), self-promotion (to open opportunities for oneself)

When Ellis Labs removed the signatures, the job board & the post count, they essentially told everyone they were no longer interested in giving anything back to the community that helped make them this strong. They wish to corner all potential revenue & cut out any possibilities of the contributors using these forums as a springboard for their own advancement.

We may give, but not take.

I don’t care to have a relationship with that type of company. I feel I have contributed enough to cover the use of the framework & libraries & code samples I have benefited from. Since Ellis Labs no longer wishes to work WITH me, I will go build a relationship with some other Open Source community & spend my time contributing to them.

I was under the impression that removal of signatures and post count were temporary and it would come back after the new design was fully implemented. But now it seems that I was wrong. Strong community support was one of main features which attracted newbies like me to Codeigniter. We tend to give more weight to reply’s of authors with higher post count.

Is it possible to create un-official forums for Codeigniter? or, are such things banned by Ellis Lab ?

Will they pay people to reports bugs? Ahh, I guess not. They want us to report bugs for free, but ask money for support?

Why even bother the time to waste your time for free. You said it perfectly, business to business, so I don´t expect anyone to make any tutorials, reports bugs, or even make plugins for it for free either.

Agree.  We are ramping down support for all EllisLab platforms for a number of reasons.  There have been nagging issues with their products for a long time and now that they have disrespected the existing customers we will be moving clients over to other platforms.

I don´t mind paying for support, but something reasonable, 2 days waiting for a website down or critical is just no support at all.

Also, what happens if the errors are from the product itself? Like on upgrades, installations, etc? I don´t think any company in the world would say there software is 100% bug free and 100% stable on absolutely any system and configuration. This is what I find scary. You need to pay for support even if its their product causing the issue? Name one single software in the world which is bug free and has 0 issues and I will name you one person that lost his mind. It just does not exist.

Let me explain one example of proper support. cPanel software is just a web GUI for open source software like Apache, Exim, PHP, etc, all of them are free and open source, they power the Internet and products like the ones build like Ellis Lab would not exists as they are build around them for free, and there are even free control panels if we go back to the cPanel example, so why do people pay cPanel? Because of the out standing support they give.

I would rather pay for EE updates each year which is common in commercial products. Also, basic support should always be free with any commercial product, other support plans could be paid and I would gladly pay a monthly/annual fee just in case I need it or something goes wrong with my website. But I would not pay for 2 days support as its pretty much useless. Anyone with a problem in EE means a problem with his website, and I don´t see who in their right mind would be comfortable to wait 2 days for a reply. In the internet, minutes are days and hours are months.

I do like that they are moving to it to a business, commercial and enterprises model, but they have to understand they will lose the advantage that made them in the first place. All this people using EE and creating stuff for it, did it for free, for passion. They will lose this, as nobody will invest their time for free anymore. They should try to keep a balance instead.

Another huge flaw I see with this business model is that they are creating competition just by using this model. Why? Because allot of companies that probably know EE even better than they do, could offer commercial support which is better for cheaper and they will have a problem now losing their income. This is what happens if they put all their main model in making profits only from support. This is also bad for the product itself because a good product rarely needs support and with this model users get suspicious that “problems” are good for the developers as they can charge money for support when people have problems, rather than getting income from releasing updates and bugs fixes.

I know allot of companies and developers burned themselves like this, because nothing really incentives them to fix things if they can charge for issues their customers have. This is why software companies tend to charge for updates, users gladly pay for support and updates, and for new features and fixes. But making all their income from support means they are actually interested in their users having problems so they purchase support from them.

My 2 cents and my time wasted posting this, as it will go to to the air. And I also did this for free. Everyone sharing here did it for free. So its not right for them to ask extra money for things that should stay free. In particular when they build their company around “free”. Charging is fine, but only if people will be willing to pay, not if they are forced to pay.