[NCLUG] local end-user support

[Michael Milligan]

Brian Wood wrote:
> Just a follow-up:
> 
> Commercial support for OSS systems might seem to be more expensive than
> that from commercial software vendors (or ir might not), remember:
> 
> To the commercial software vendors you are a revenue stream. You pai for
> the software and will presumably keep paying for the upgrades and
> perhaps future products. They want to keep you "on the hook", and will
> therefore provide support at cost or perhaps even for less. "Support" is
> a word that refers to their entire profit structure.
> 
> Somebody supporting an OSS product sees no revenue from the initial
> product, has no hope of future revenue from upgrades or other products
> and must therefore support their entire business including overhead,
> taxes etc. on the revenue of the "support".

And that's exactly why it just doesn't work.  People are not used to
paying extra for support, it's bundled, so it's "unnatural" to pay extra
for it.  Look at what a turn-off "per incident" support from Microsoft
is.  The support business model for end-users is well established, and
changing that mindset of end-users would take a lot of effort and time
to change.

Regards,
Mike

-- 
Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com