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Ask Slashdot: Troubling Trend For Open Source Company
An anonymous reader writes "I'm one of the original founders of an open source company which offers a popular open source product (millions of downloads) targeted primarily to small businesses. We have been doing this for 10 years now and we fund the development of the open source product with the usual paid support services, custom development and addons, but over the last few years, we've noticed a troubling trend. Companies that have downloaded our product from one of the many free download sites have a question they want answered, so they call our support line. Once we politely explain the situation and that telephone support has a reasonable fee associated with it, more and more of them are becoming seriously irate, to the point of yelling, accusing us of fraud and/or scamming them. For some reason, they think a free product should have free telephone support as well, and if we don't offer free telephone support then it's not really a free product. These same people are then resorting to social media in an attempt to 'spread the word' with the same false accusations, which is starting to take its toll on our reviews, ratings, and in turn our bottom line. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions on how we can reverse this trend? How do other open source companies handle similar situations?"
Just split the company into two main parts.
Your flagship company only offers paid downloads, if you want the product, you've got to pay for support.
You then have another site/organization that offers everything for free and only has community support forums.
For example, if your product is called Corporate Wizard, you'd have your Corporate Wizard only host the Corporate Wizard software and you've got to pay money to download it (with source included of course).
However, you have a community maintained "fork" called, say, Company Mage. While the codebases are 100% identical, someone who downloaded Company Mage is downloading a community maintained product with only support forums. This way, it separates the free products/no support from the paid products with support.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Setup a phone system where they have to key in their Support ID to be transferred to a support rep.
It goes even further then what the original poster says, I wrote a shareware HTML editor a long time ago when such a thing was a novel idea. It gained a fair amount of attention, even being put on the cover cd of various computer mags. However, as soon as it was put on a cover CD in Germany, a crack was released. No one ever paid for it, despite millions of downloads and constant use. I still to this day get support requests from people claiming to have a legit copy.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually, advertise only a pay-as-you-go phone support service, and give a 900 number beside that. Always make sure that the 900 number is only displayed as part of a sentence and that the phrase "pay-as-you-go phone support" precedes the number.
On the same pages, advertise something like "We operate an 800 phone support service for as little as $x per year or month". Make that one a link that takes people to a page which advertises the full menu of phone support services, with free 900 support at the BOTTOM of the list, and PREMIUM EXPRESS phone support at the top of the list. Most people who subscribe will choose something between those two choices so best make it only one middle choice and price it at a level that will keep your business healthy.
You could even be nice and offer the 900 people a free answerback call if their issue takes longer than a certain threshold (one that starts to push their cost up into subscription territory.). And after you solve the 900 problem, offer them a special deal to upgrade to subscription service where you apply their 900 fees to the subscription payment. Assuming that the subscription fee - $10 is $Y, and they have spent $10 on the call so far, then give them a coupon number that they can send with a check for $Y to get a support subscription. When the check arrives, email them the 800 number...