Keith, Thank you for your reply, which I must say was polite, professional, mature and basically well said.
I take your point at looking at the situation from a different view. I have and yes perhaps my outburst was somewhat irrational. I am sure that Bruno is in fact a nice guy trying to help. But perhaps you'd do me the courtesy of looking at it from my point of view... 1. I am not the only one who finds Bruno's tone somewhat rude - John Renfrew stated earlier in this thread, 'Yes, Bruno can appear irascible...'. I find this hard to understand and/or accept from someone who is trying to build a business. I have my own small company and I do a day job for a blue chip. If I used that tone in my emails for my own company I wouldn't have any customers. If I used it in my day job - I'd be sacked! 2. For someone new to iText the corporate message is very confusing. Initially, it looks a great product, easy to use, is free (subject to certain licensing) and offers a 'free' mailing list for technical questions (Quote from website: If you have a technical question and you want to get an answer for free, please subscribe and post your question to the mailing list.) But that's not quite the situation is it? The 'free' help is limited - which is fine, but it needs to be explained up front. Giving the impression that technical help is 'free' and then restricting the help and/or asking for payment is confusing and irritating. 3. I appreciate Bruno is trying to build a business - and, although you may not believe this - I truly wish him success. But for me, his approach doesn't work... i. If he is offering iText and limited technical help for 'free' to encourage and entice potential customers, then (again for me) his approach needs to more friendly and better toned. Being 'irascible' is not the way. ii. If Bruno really is trying to build iText in to a business then he needs to promote the commercialism from the start. Sure, offer iText for free with free help but for (say) a 30 day evaluation period. Don't promote it one way and run it another. 4. With respect to the phone call. Yes Bruno did call me but it's not quite as it seems. After I received Bruno's email asking for my corporate address I admit I was pretty incensed. So I sent my post saying I would not be buying a license. The post could have just about made it to the list when my mobile rang - it was a Belgian number so I was pretty sure it would be Bruno. I answered the call. Whoever was making the call immediately hung up without saying a word! Furthermore, no voice mail message was left. Now you have to understand - my impression of Bruno at that time was of someone who is abrupt and rude and so my immediate reaction to why he phoned me was simply to either a)annoy me or b)to check on me in some concealed/covert way. Why else would he hang up on me? Surely, if he wanted to talk to me he would not have hung up! This incensed me even more! That said, I must be honest and say Bruno did call back again (perhaps 15 mins later) but by then I was in a meeting and could not take the call - and on this occasion he did leave a voice mail message. I have to say that I am disappointed that it has come to this. We were quite excited when we discovered iText. It looked like the perfect solution. Unfortunately, our view has been tainted by what we considered to be an abrupt tone. My personal view is that Bruno needs to decide on what he wants - does he want to continue providing iText and his time in answering technical questions for free, or does he want to commercialise iText and charge for it and his time? At the moment it appears to be (as far as I can see) a half-way house, which is very confusing and is probably the root cause of our misunderstanding. Anyway, I guess I've burnt this bridge now! Again, thanks for your very reasoned, professional and mature approach - at least you didn't call me a 'dick' or suggest 'I man up' - both of which only adds credence to my argument about tone! Kind regards William -----Original Message----- From: Keith O [mailto:kuuji...@hotmail.com] Sent: 10 August 2011 09:19 To: itext-questions@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [iText-questions] Fwd: FW: Retrieving settings from PDF files using iText Hi William, ________________________________ > From: wrb...@btinternet.com > To: itext-questions@lists.sourceforge.net > Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 23:18:20 +0100 > Subject: Re: [iText-questions] Fwd: FW: Retrieving settings from PDF > files using iText Before I start, just want to note that I'm not bashing you here. Just asking you to look at things from another perspective. <snip> > And I am sorry, but I have not witness Bruno ever going that extra > mile Bruno blogged about your thread: http://lowagie.com/ungrateful I have to disagree with your statement quoted above. Try and think of it this way - if Bruno wasn't going the extra mile and didn't care about helping **you** (or in general making the situation better) why would he make the effort to pick up a phone and call? Just **my** observation, but someone **not** going the extra mile would never bother wasting a single second of their time trying to contact someone by phone. Or money, if the call was long distance. Not only that, but according to the blog post he gave you the answer :) People are individually entitled to define what they consider as rude or dismissive, and I'm not going to dismiss what **you** feel. But again, consider this - if Bruno **really** doesn't care about helping as many people on the mailing list as he can, wouldn't it be easier for him to completely dismiss/ignore all the posts that he **personally** doesn't like? I've been subsribed to this list for a few years and I can tell you without a doubt that Bruno answers a **ton** of posts that other members **personally** choose not to answer because of lack of time, obvious laziness (not taking even a second of their own time to search for easy answers) on the part of the poster, or other reason. And I'm not putting your thread in any of those categories - as stated at the start, not here to bash you. To put it another way - if I were in Bruno's shoes I sure as hell wouldn't bother with many of the posts that he **does** take time to answer, in detail. Lastly, let's just say for the sake of argument that Bruno was rude and dismissive towards you. Posts like here: http://www.mail-archive.com/itext-questions@lists.sourceforge.net/msg58037.h tml are not doing anything positive for the mailing list members. On the contrary, it only inflames the situation. If you strongly feel that Bruno has been rude and dismissive, you are certainly entitled to **your** opinion. And if that's the case, the strongest way to send a message saying as much is to switch to a competing product - that's **always** a customer's best way to voice their opinion. keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- uberSVN's rich system and user administration capabilities and model configuration take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. Learn more about uberSVN and get a free download at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/wandisco-dev2dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions iText(R) is a registered trademark of 1T3XT BVBA. Many questions posted to this list can (and will) be answered with a reference to the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Please check the keywords list before you ask for examples: http://itextpdf.com/themes/keywords.php ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ uberSVN's rich system and user administration capabilities and model configuration take the hassle out of deploying and managing Subversion and the tools developers use with it. Learn more about uberSVN and get a free download at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/wandisco-dev2dev _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions iText(R) is a registered trademark of 1T3XT BVBA. Many questions posted to this list can (and will) be answered with a reference to the iText book: http://www.itextpdf.com/book/ Please check the keywords list before you ask for examples: http://itextpdf.com/themes/keywords.php
