[@xprojectsx Participant 6 years ago]

Robin, thank you. You are awesome. (period not exclamation point)

I’ve been using commercial and open source software for a long time and have donated both financially and in contributions to development, to several open source projects. There is definitely a disparity in how open source /free software projects, are managed and supported by their teams. Some do it very well, most do not. In my opinion there is a direct relationship between how well it is supported FOR the user base by the developers, and how successful they are. I’ve seen some spin off into IPOs over the years and in my opinion this was largely based upon having enthusiastic users. This type of enthusiasm is not generated from features. It isn’t just a matter of paying the bills. It’s an issue of quality management. It is not enough to just hang your hat on “free” and “you get what you pay for” (the implication being : so you have no say or recourse so just take what you get or get lost). If you put something out there as free, you should still manage its viability otherwise the end result will be wasting people’s time.

Also, wrt to commercial projects, the problem is not using products as sales tools, the problem is first providing reasonable support to a product that a customer has paid for. Then if you have add-on products or services, great. If I, or other customers are happy we will gladly buy more and in some cases (such as myself) we will become (unpaid) evangelists for your product(s). And that is the ideal situation for good companies and good customers.

But if you don’t start with core support and getting your user/customer base happy and familiar with normal issues and breaking-in issues then, that is not OK. That is basically just bait and switch. You are luring people in on the premise of something but really just trying to get them to spend more. The distinction being the false dichotomy of customer receiving reasonable value vs. the developers right to be paid.

Personally I have wasted a good portion of my life on poorly supported products and I have spent a (not small) fortune both in purchases, fixes and wasted time. I’m sure I’m not alone.