In reply to Tada Burke.

I've fought this fight since OSCommerce was known as The Exchange Project (March 2000).

There's a HUGE disconnect between the "it's free - get over it" dev community and the end users who need things to just work with no major headaches.

I've been straddling this fence since 1994.

Comments like:

"Every software has bugs period."
"hmmm, the plugin author didn’t force you to install it."
"Ron, plugin in the directory is not a service. Developers just share their code there."
"GPL software is offered with no warranty."
etc, etc, etc

WP will always be a good choice for small businesses because it's free.

WP will always be a good choice for large businesses because they have a team of geeks that can do whatever they want (or pay a company to do it for them).

Where WP is missing the boat is in between. The businesses that are willing to spend some money but don't have a budget for a team. Think 1 geek that knows his stuff (in this case that's me :)

Think $5mil to $50mil or so annual sales.

This is the sweet spot IMO that a lot of you are blowing. Small don't want to spend money - large are going with the big players (or internally) - medium are going where? To those devs that approach it from the other side of the table and not the dev side.

Medium businesses don't give a damn how you get there. Save us the gory details. Does it work? Can I understand it and use it in my everyday work life? Great! You get paid.

If WP is serious about really growing in the business market the attitudes above will have to change.

My apologies to Vlad - you did the right thing and handled things professionally. I purposely threw out flame bait to see what responses I would get. It appears not much has changed in the open-source world when it comes to devs attitudes.

That's a shame....

Businesses don't want to see drama from the dev community. Businesses don't care that some dev spent 100s and 100s of hours creating something for free. In business we just want something that works - period.

The first time you throw attitude at a medium sized business owner about open-source and no warranties, etc, you've lost them for good.

Just some thoughts to chew on....

Carry on....