Ask Slashdot: Troubling Trend For Open Source Company 451
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?"
Give them a refund (Score:5, Funny)
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.
That's actually good news! (Score:5, Funny)
An Easy Solution... (Score:4, Funny)
I call bullshit on this comment. (Score:1, Funny)
I noticed this as well. Doesn't it also seem odd to you that it was submitted anonymously? Who submitted it? Was it submitted by the FSF to tarnish the reputation of proprietary software? The lack of details make this comment so suspicious that it could very well have been RMS or a shill!
Be honest (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:This isn't surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit (Score:2, Funny)
This guy's on to us.
Re:What company (Score:5, Funny)
Why not offer two "phone gateways" for your support? One for customers with existing support contract, and another for those without.
My first thought to this was to implement some community building - collect the numbers of previous freeloaders, especially the yelling ones, and implement call forwarding of new freeloaders to any of the previous ones. They can discuss their problems and provide free support to each others, even without registering to a forum...
For those who take this serious: Sorry, slashdot ate my irony tags :-(