Is open-source software support better than closed-source software support?
I don't think there's a useful answer to this question: is open-source software support better than closed-source software support? While I believe that open source aligns vendor interests with customer interests, I don't think that this necessarily translates into world-class support. At the end of the day, people and process create excellent support organizations. Source code access is an important but not the defining factor in how good support is.
Why do I bring it up? Well, I didn't. Michael Coté over at Redmonk did. Mark Hinkle of Zenoss then followed up, and adds insight into how open source is changing the nature of support:
Mark frames his discussion around two graphics: one shows how support gets used in closed-source software (The X axis (vertical) is time spent on support and the Y axis (horizontal) is volume of incidents)...
(Credit:
Mark Hinkle)
(Credit:
Mark Hinkle)
This sounds about right to me, but it actually poses a quandary for those who make money from selling support subscriptions. Namely, if in the proprietary world one of the primary drivers of support is assistance during the installation process, and if you largely remove this in open source because people tend to get up and running with community support, has open source shot itself in the foot?
Sort of. In my experience, you still end up providing this support, either through your forums or your sales engineers (pre-sales support). You just don't get paid for it. What you do get from it, however, is early discovery of what prospects want to do with your software so that you can help them be successful.
In the proprietary world, the customers buy on hype and then, hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions) into the snafu, they ring support to try to make the disaster less painful. In open source, they only engage support (through a paid contract) when they know the software is a good fit and they're ready to engage the company for advanced features, resolution of complex problems, etc. It's much better for the customer.
But for the vendor...? No, not as much. This is frankly why many of the open-source companies use proprietary extensions of their software in their business model. It's not because they think proprietary extensions help the customer, or because they have lingering affinity for the proprietary world. It's because they're trying to give the customer a convenient reason to purchase even when support won't trigger a purchase decision. It's not a model that I like, but it's one that I can understand.
All of which brings me back to the original question in the title of this entry. Is open-source support better? No, not necessarily. It does a better job of meeting customer needs with lower risk and lower prices, and allows them to more easily support themselves. As for whether the person on the other side of the call is competent and diligent to resolve the customer's issue, that differs from company to company, and project to project.
Just like in proprietary software.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Community users expect/demand support from commercial open source companies. If the community can help them, well ok, but if it can't -- customers often become very vocal and frustrated -- they want answers from the engineering staff (for free via the forums)
Now the other side of the coin is that the commercial open source company does benefit from helping the community. I think most companies get this -- and their folks spend a lot of time (allocated and personal) helping the community.
Some thoughts / questions I have:
* Should there be some sort of written service level agreement with the community -- set the expectations.
* Sometimes you need to fire customers, is it ever appropriate to fire a community member?
* The developers who are asking for the supports usually don?t make the decision to purchase -- but they do influence it. I remember telling my CIO -- "They won't support me in the forums, and I am an active member -- what makes us think they will support them after we give them cash?"
* Do the questions in the forums really point to customer needs? Is this what we want to be true or what is true? Maybe it just says our install process stinks or our code has a ton of bugs -- good information but tactical at best.
* What is the impact of the oss company?s good will vs. the effect of negative press by community members unhappy with level of their free support?
* How does community support and paid for support work together? What is the focus? Opportunity or profitability?
* Do we have a scalable community support model? Are we mentoring and growing the community so that it can cover more as our business grows and so that it is able to offset the labor requirement of serving the community? How does growth in the community work with our business model?
Red Hat subscriptions explicitly don't support customisations of their code base - that's where consulting revenue comes in. So maybe i'm thinking maintenance/updates rather than "Software Support" in all it's guises.
For proprietary vendors we trade with, all the salespeople are measured on new license sales only - and leave the support renewals (20% of original license costs) to small background teams. The actual mix for most vendors (as they have many customers renewing contracts every year over the life of a server) is around 50% new licenses, 50% support revenue. I suspect almost all the new license sales pay cost of sales at not much more.
Open Source Salespeople tend to get rewarded on nett new or on subscription renewals equally well. If nothing else, open source salespeople are encouraged to support customers well in their metrics far more than the salespeople of proprietary vendors.
Ian W.