Move from Community to Customers?

Excerpt of a comment by Carl Crawley on Jack McDade’s blog post:

As a community, we’re somewhat unique in our close sense of pride and support in ExpressionEngine, so a lot of the times, when bugs are reported, other community members (including myself) will post ‘workarounds’ or ‘fixes’ which hack/fix the bug. This has created a SNAFU situation whereby we self-sustain the platform without direct involvement of EllisLab and it simply cannot go on. Regardless of our community, we are the customers of EllisLab and owners of a commercial product. As a result they have to become more culpable of their failings to their customers and the bug list is just one of the areas where they’ve fallen down in my opinion and they need to buck up their ideas pretty quickly or we’re going to see an exodus away from the platform.

I’ve thought a lot about this comment from Carl. At first, I nodded my head in agreement. The community is certainly sustaining EE in a way. But in the same way it always has: through community resources, learning materials, invaluable add-ons, collegiality, and conferences. There is certainly a problem with the number of bugs unaddressed and plenty of fixed from the community.

There are definitely problems. But any CMS would die if the community walked away. That’s just how it works. I don’t see how we are any different.