Ole Husgaard Wrote:
> We do not loose online support because somebody does
> paid support. Nobody really has the power to stop
> online support, and nobody really wants to.
> Why?
> Because the online support is also free as in "free
> speech", not "free beer". Although nobody pays any
> $$$ for the online support, there is a price for
> this too: You have to formulate your questions, and
> accept that your mail to the list is archived for
> other people to see. So even if you just send a mail
> to jboss-user asking "How do I do this?", you
> contribute something back to the JBoss project.
Online support (mailing lists and Usenet), which is probably better labeled
"community support", offers a totally different service to paid support.
With paid support, the person you ask for support becomes accountable for
your problem. You phone up. You get a ticket number. If they can't
reproduce the problem, it's _their_ ball. If they don't get back to you in
a certain time with a satisfactory answer, you stop paying them and they go
out of business. Paid support is great because you can point to a large
piece of the work of maintaining your application and say "This is no
longer our problem."
With community support, you are accountable for your own problem. You
search the list archives. You try a few fixes yourself to make sure you're
not wasting anyone's time. You post your question to the list. If nobody
responds, you're on your own. If you manage to fix the problem yourself,
you take the time and effort to share your fix with the community.
Users who want a supported product will find one with paid support. Users
who want to be able to fix their own problems will look for a product with
an active community. A lot of people will go for both. This isn't limited
to Open Source projects either. Look at IBM - they support Websphere in the
traditional paid-for manner, but they also maintain newsgroups for the user
community to support each other.
Often, having community support will make providing paid support cheaper.
Paid support is better done by contract, rather than pay-per-incident. If
you have an active user community, then a higher percentage of the calls
you get under the support contract are for _real_ problems, because you
have a community-managed knowledge base that handles the trivial fixes.
Thus the support team spends less time dealing with the trivial cases, but
still justifies its existance by providing expert consultancy for the
non-trivial ones. Similarly, even if you are paying for support, you don't
want to go to the effort of opening an incident ticket over something that
you can find a fix for in a few minutes of searching archives.
Thus, the two types of support complement each other, rather than compete
with each other.
Charles Miller
Consultant
Cirrus Technologies
t: +61 2 9299 3544
f: +61 2 9299 5950
Give me a compiler, and a star to steer her by.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List Help?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
