I have been debating how to write this blog post since about 3pm yesterday. But I wanted all the personal attacks to stop and the community to calm down, so I could get a good read on what’s actually happening to the CodeIgniter “community,” and not just give a knee jerk reaction.

About 15 hours ago, Phil wrote a blog post, addressing the issues that we, the CodeIgniter Community, deal with. It really boiled down to: 

• Lack of transparency from EllisLab
• Lack of commit activity/community contribution to the Repo

Then things went all batty. Derek Jones made a, perhaps not too well thought out, comment on Phil’s post, where he attacks people that may or may not have been a part of Ellis at one point (Horrigan, Allard). He called people thieves, lazy, and even went as far as saying it’s all about the documentation and years of planning are all that matter when delivering a good product. 

After -that- dust settled a little bit, I wanted to take a step back and see what is actually happening. It turns out that EllisLab simply has no clue about how to run or manage an open-source, community driven, project.

Every single comment from EllisLab in someway referred to the amount of money, or the amount of time that goes into CodeIgniter, and they “don’t ask for a thing” in return. Take a look at this tweet from EllisLab president Leslie Comacho

Revenue EllisLab earns from #codeigniter, 0. It is a gift, given freely without expectation. Sympathy I have for CI haters, also 0. 

A “gift”?!? People that build open source products don’t do it because they want to grace us with thier amazing programming ability. They build an open-source project because they love and care about community, and they think they other people can help where they fall short. The motives are all wrong here.

The problem with this particular project, is that EllisLab doesn’t think they fall short. Look at this particular issue. Over 4 months ago, a community member felt a feature should be added, so they coded it up, to EllisLab’s code standards, and… nothing. 4 months ago. The committer was not giving a ‘gift’. He was sharing something he found useful (very useful, actually) with the community in hopes it could help someone else. 

Another issue that -every- CodeIgniter developer runs into, is the ability to accept query strings in the URI. For whatever, unholy reason, we aren’t allowed to have query strings in out URI with out either screwing up all the helpers, or hacking the shit out of the core. I’ve heard from more than one source that this is for “aesthetic” reasons. Unfortunately, some of us deal with oh, TOKENS, from Paypal, Google Checkout, Twitter, Facebook, or other some-such that we have no control over. A quick search for ‘Query Strings’ on the CodeIgniter forums return over 350 (at the time of this posting) results. 

EllisLab is not listening to their community. 

Now, let’s look at Rails. Another open-source frame written by [people at] a very large company. Over 1,600 people contributed to Rails 3.0. 1,600! Rarely a few days goes without a commit, and in most cases, rarely a few hours goes with out a commit, and the RoR community is thriving. 

And never once has any one on the core team, or at 37signals, called it a “gift,” or expressed with pain how they don’t monetarily profit from it. That is a community that is run by the community, not a corporation ran by the love of money.

UPDATE: (10-29-2010)

I wasn’t going to post this. But Leslie Camacho’s blog post put the nail in the coffin. They finally admitted that CI’s only reason for existence was to further profit EllisLab. When Phil Sturgeon, Dan Horrigan, or myself release a CodeIgniter Library to the community, it is for the good of the community, not for the betterment of ourselves. 

37signals gave rails to the community because they love their community. Not only the people that built web applications, but the people that uses Basecamp, et. al, as well.

This quote from Leslie’s blog shows exactly what EllisLab is about.

Though there are a number of things we can do right now to improve things, the long view is that CI either has to generate revenue directly or we need to find a creative middle ground acceptable to this part of the CI Community. CI may be a gift, but its not a charity. We are a for-profit company and if I devote resources to CI differently then we currently do, it impacts the things that pay the bills. Tinkering with the formula that has helped us succeed so far is no trivial matter.

Then let us do it! DHH doesn’t hand inspect every single commit into the core, because he (or 37S) are afraid it’s going to screwup Basecamp on the next push. EllisLab is not trusting of their community, and afraid.

See, the real difference here, is that 37Signals actually uses Rails. The community version of Rails. Not some ridiculous hacked version that only sort of resembles Rails.

I guess in the end, does any of this really matter? Not really. CI is still a tool that I use often, and that I’m going to continue to use daily. The issue is that the community is falling apart, not CodeIgniter (like some people seem to think). At the end of the day, I really don’t care if the company that built my Hammer went out of business, or has political issues internally, as long as I still have the hammer.