
Ask HN: Why should open source support be free? I don't think it should. - hoodoof
i.e. the software is free and open source but the developers only answer questions from those who pay.<p>Got a question, maybe the community will help.  Definitely want an answer? Pay the monthly support fee.<p>How would you feel about that?<p>I&#x27;ll say how I feel - I think it&#x27;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.<p>Software free, sure thing, great.  However, I can&#x27;t see why any open source support should be free.<p>Tell me why it should.
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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.

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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.

