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Ask HN: Why should open source support be free? I don't think it should.

2 points by hoodoof ↗ HN
i.e. the software is free and open source but the developers only answer questions from those who pay.

Got a question, maybe the community will help. Definitely want an answer? Pay the monthly support fee.

How would you feel about that?

I'll say how I feel - I think it's entirely reasonable that you get to use free software for free, but if you want the developers to answer your support questions it hard for me to see why they should be at your service for nothing.

Software free, sure thing, great. However, I can't see why any open source support should be free.

Tell me why it should.

4 comments

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skewart
Does anyone actually think it _should_ be free? Are there really people who think a developer who creates and maintains an opensource project should be obligated to answer any and all support questions and requests?!

I assume you must have run into people who think this way OP, or else you wouldn't be asking the question. I can't say I've ever heard anyone argue that though.

Offering free open source software with paid support is a well-established business model. It's probably hard to scale quickly, but if you have a popular project with decent enterprise adoption you can probably make it work. In fact, offering paid as opposed to free support will probably help your project get traction with enterprise users. They'll feel more comfortable knowing they can have a contractual guarantee for support as opposed to just hoping you follow through.

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gus_massa
If it's a small project, you can do whatever you want. Most (all) open source licenses don't force the owner/maintainer to provide support. They have big "AS IS" clause.

For a big project, you can try it, but it's very difficult to build a community around it without some free support.

Also, you want (good) bugs reports, so you have to allow free bugs reports. (It's also allows bad bugs reports, but it's difficult some user to tell them apart.)

Also, you want to provide some babysitting of good pull request from power users, in spite perhaps some of them don't pay. (For example, at some low levels of academic work, they can run/install whatever they want, but they have no money.)

And you want some free support for people installing it only for testing. Usually Windows box are very homogeneous and you an provide a foolproof installer, Linux has usually more configuration details.

With all of these, you will have a group of users that get to a big company that can invest some money to hire you as consultants, pay to attend conferences or make donations.

It's possible and legal to attempt your method, but I don't know a big project that was successful without some free support.

Also, I you don't provide support, you will get anyway an unofficial support group in StackOverflow or a subredit.

And you still have the possibilities of a hostile fork. If the hostile fork has approximately the same capacity to produce new code and better free support, it will probably take over.

psook
The implicit fault in the OP is that the developers don't get anything out of providing support. This is entirely false, however, as your users are your testers. If the product isn't good enough to pay for, as many projects are when they start, or fills too small of a niche to justify a payment from someone, you risk your project becoming stagnant due to no user-input. When others use open source projects, their specific goals for using the project might vary slightly from the developer's, and the use-case will never be fleshed out--leaving the project at a lower quality than it could be, limiting appeal and growth.

That doesn't mean it's the wrong choice all the time, but these are the tradeoffs that you're making when you make that choice.