Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Only then can start figuring out how to increase the IQ of said users.
If they don't like your product, offer them a full refund of the purchase price they paid to your company. Heck, offer them double their money back if they are not 100% satisfied.
Unless they paid some money to someone, it's not clear why they would think they are entitled to support. I've run lots of open source software that had paid support support, and have gladly paid for support when I needed it.
Studies have been done; the people that pay the least always complain the most.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
We are not an open source company, but we had a very similar problem. We ended up plain removing free/normal cost phone numbers, only the expensive support phone numbers remained. Problem solved itself.
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.
This is a communication issue. You have limited resources, we know, but you need to target this issue exclusively for an extended period of time and communicate to the marketplace that the software is free to access but support is paid.
We use open source / free software almost exclusively and the one thing that we look for are paid for support contract options. We want to spend the money, but you would be surprised how many orgs simply don't want our money or communicate the support options clearly.
Get the advertising and messaging right and commit to it on a longer term basis. If you don't offer a properly framed counter, you allow the trolls to control the message.
And, in the end, all you can do is provide a clear message to the community. No matter how large the org, you cannot control the perception, you can however influence it. Get on the playing field and make the moves. Your real clients will appreciate it.
Setup a phone system where they have to key in their Support ID to be transferred to a support rep.
It might help if you told us who you were.
It would probably help more to know how they got hold of the support line. Everywhere the number is given there should be some clear text indicating that there is a support fee required to use it. If you just advertise the line as "call us for support" and then hit them for a fee when they call it might annoy some users who are unaware of the usual Open Source model and intellectually challenged enough to not see reason when you explain.
If you are making it clear in all the locations where the number is given then introduce a premium rate number and have that as the public one with a normal rate line whose number is private available to paying customers. If your users don't read the explanation around the support number then they won't see the explanation that they are calling a premium rate number either but at least this way the default is that they pay.
This.
Have a paid for version and a "community" version that only has public forums associated with it. Make it blatantly clear that paid for includes support (for X time period), but a community supported free version is available. If they want phone support they have to upgrade to the paid version. "Sorry, our community edition doesn't include phone support."
This can be done with the exact same codebase for both, but it also gives you the opportunity to fork (in marketing speak: differentiate the product). E.g. New features go to the paid version first and get released in to the community later. Or, do it the other way and make your free users beta test. I recommend having at least a different splash screen and the registration info available from within the program on the paid version.
Bottom line is you can't allow your free customers to have any expectation of live support. When they go to download your product they are explicitly deciding between paid and free and know what they are losing by going free.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Tell them to fix it themselves and submit patches.
Tell them they can have their money back.
Tell them that you could have fixed it for $100 but now you'll have to add the Moron Surcharge and now it's $10k.
Tell them to fuck off.
I'm not sure why they marked you as flamebait. The old saying "You can't fix stupid' definitely applies here. Any 'company' that would use a product without doing even a minimal vetting of you and your support infrastructure is just stupid not to put too fine a point on it.
With that said however, in the spirit of open source, you should at a minimum note that support is provided with the product only with a fee and you should make this as obvious as is possible. An informed user has no room for complaint. This pay for play support info should be easy to find where they download the product, and better yet, an 'agree' prompt in order to install it. A simple 'agree' type prompt to indicate they understand that you will not be providing free support can cut short any complaints stating "we didn't know". Something as basic as that will tend to weed out a lot of 'indignation' if people have to accept the prompt in order to download and to install.
As a 'gimme', you could also provide user forums where they can ask the user community itself for help. Most sites provide this and those types of forums will typically reduce a lot of support 'chatter' for easy questions. If you go this route, the same method should be used to inform anyone who signs up to use the forum that it is not an official support forum, but rather community supported, and any 'official' support is provided for a fee.
Not knowing your history, I suspect some of these people are finding the lack of free support after the fact, meaning you are not making that information easily available to them (regardless of how they should have looked for it in the first place). If you make the information easy to find, I would think a lot of the nastiness will disappear. The fact that you are seeing a trend would indicate they are not finding that information easily enough, and you could probably better present that up front.
I'm the person who originally posted the story. Unfortunately when dealing with software targeted to businesses the IT person or the consultant is the one who installs the product, rarely the one who ends up calling support , so any "I agree" check boxes during the installation are unlikely to get the message to the people who really need it.
In fact most of the time the person calling has no idea they are using a free product, despite it being clearly displayed on every screen, and no idea if they have paid for support.