Paid vs Community support
August 8th, 2007 by HenA colleague sent this blog entry from Matt Asay around at work. It was interesting reading, but with poor conclusions.
Matt says that “developer communities are great for developers, and not so great for anyone outside them”. That’s wrong, instead it’s “communities are great for members of the community, and not so great for anyone outside them”. Well that’s a shock 
Matt’s revelation is in fact a piece of circular logic.
It hits again when Matt says “if you already know your way around the code of Debian or Apache, you’re more likely to get a response”. Again wrong - “if you are a member of the community, you are more likely to get a response”. Again, big shock and some circular logic revealed.
He talks about 99.999999% of the world not being developers (or community members as he should have said), and that again is a crap piece of text. Any attempt to use ‘the world’ is useless as the majority of the world lack a computer. The number who use MuleSource/JasperSoft/SugarCRM is tiny tiny, and the number of those who have the money to pay for paid support is smaller. So what was the point of that paragraph? Strike it from the record. Except…
Except community isn’t just a singleton. There’s the dev list, there’s the user list, there’s the forum at some website out there (codeguru etc) which has sprung up for extended users, there’s the mailing list at a large corporate where people gripe about a project and share info, there’s the wiki page at your own workplace. This is all community support, and this is what Matt is really attempting to target with his ‘paid better than free’. In the end, paid vs community is not about being able to get an answer from the community, but being able to demand an answer from the paid support. It’s about SLAs, and if you demand that SLA, then you should be paying. Otherwise, join a community.
To put it simpler - if something is business critical, don’t rely on the community. Rely on a business. Now go figure out what’s critical.
The one thing I liked about the report was that the paper Matt quotes chose to hold the Apache HTTP Server project up as a failing community support example. Should be interesting hearing their views on that one.
(I’ll use a different blog entry to talk about the underlying paper)