Well, I can not speak for everyone but our main concerns are roughly the
following:
1) STABILITY: We need as much stability as we can get i.e. have as many
test cases as possible
and guarantee (as much as possible) that data corruption and/or critical
bugs are extinct from
stable versions. This would more or less mean that you should maintain
two different versions
(stable and dev). As I understand it you currently have data corruption
avoidance as your first
priority but you only have the time to support one single dev branch,
which inevitably sometimes
breaks backwards compatibility and bugs related to new features always
lurk around. I am guessing
that other companies could pay for maintenance of really old releases as
well, although this is not
one of our concerns.
2) PROJECT ENDURANCE: One big issue with open source projects is that you
never know when it is
going to be abandoned. The donations model is ok(and should continue to
exist ), but does not guarantee
that version 1.2.136 is not the last yet. While you may have the best
intentions, we need a way to convince
the employer that someone is actually committing his time on this
project and will continue to do so mainly
because he has a strong motive (and that's getting paid). Hence a
commercial support contract does help
a lot in taking the decision to actually use H2 in a commercial
project.
3) EASY DEPLOYMENT: One of the main reasons we have chosen H2 is because of
its small size and ease of
deployment, which bundled with its performance and rich set of features,
beats the competition hands down,
at least as far as embeddable java databases go. Hence we would like H2
to stay that way (at least its core)
and new features that really increase the size of the final jar be
developed as separate plugins following a
some kind of modular architecture. That is not to say that we do not
want the project to evolve
but we simply like it to remain compact, super-fast and rock-solid.
Now having discussed what our main concerns are and after a
brief discussion with my employer
a support model that would work for us would be something like:
A one year subscription model with unlimited support tickets( either through
email or a forum or even through
an issue tracker such as JIRA ) and guaranteed response times and problem
resolution within 1-2 business days.
The price range is really something that you have to decide upon mainly
depending on what you have to offer
, since I am guessing you will offer more than one packages, but we would be
willing to pay about 200-1000 euros depending on what you actually offer and
for a model similar to the one described above.
I suggest that you investigate on what kind of support models others are
using and what they charge for both
open-source and commercial projects. The list is endless...
We, for example, among others have bought the JIDE Ultimate
Suite<http://www.jidesoft.com/purchase/order.htm>(a
commercial product) and are quite happy
with their support model and prices.
As far as new feature/enhancements go, I think that a per incident charge
would be ok, though
there are also licensing issues in the way. I am guessing that there are
companies that would pay you to
implement a new feature but also like to keep the licensing rights and not
release it to the community.
You could for example charge less for the ones who also allow you to release
it to the community and/or
resell it to other customers.
You could also develop tools, more advanced features , etc. and charge
them separately.
The possibilities are endless...
Finally, I think its up to you to take some action and start offering some
kind of commercial support. On top of
that I think you should also advertise the project a bit more even through
articles(see java.net) , blogs, etc.
since it is an excellent project that many java programmers are not aware of
its existence.
Thanks a lot for your time,
Best regards,
Panayiotis Vlissidis
P.S: I hope everything makes sense since my English are not that good..
Please let me know if you
need more clarifications.
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