Same thing goes for PHP. You've developed something tens or houndreds of thousands of developers all over the world are using. They rely on what you tell them, their businesses rely on that, they need to move on, they need reliable, stable software. Software they have trust in, software they believe is made by people listening to their concerns and needs. And if you here tell them that you don't give a whatever on what they're thinking, you're virtually kneeing them in the guts.
Then you better put on some protection, because this isn't going to change. Like I said, we develop software for ourselves, not for customers. This isn't a traditional vendor-customer relationship where customers get to bicker and the vendor jumps through hoops to appease the customers.
When I say we develop software for ourselves, I mean we, as a community, develop software for us, the community. Every user of the software is part of the community and helps out in various ways whether it be by submitting the odd useful bug report, adding a note to the documentation or helping with the actual code. Some don't contribute anything, but they are still part of this community. By being part of the community you have a voice and through our extremely open approach you can easily contribute your code and ideas.
If your business relies heavily on PHP, you damn well better get involved and make yourself heard in a productive way or you may indeed find things suddenly breaking for you and you will have nobody to blame but yourself. Hire yourself a PHP developer, or get a consultant on retainer or something if you want any sort of assurance that things won't break.
We welcome contributions, but we react rather badly when people come along and demand that we volunteer more of our time. We have wives, girlfriends, kids, jobs and other activities that demand our time as well and having someone say that because we have given up a lot of time in the past we are obligated to continue to do so is amazingly rude. Or to use your phrase, it is nothing but improper.
-Rasmus
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