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Open source business model turning into a liabilit

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "As the owner of a successful 10yr old open source company that sells support and add-ons to accompany its popular free offerings (millions of downloads), we have started noticing a disturbing trend recently. Because we fund new development from these revenue streams, naturally we don't offer free "real-time" (chat/telephone) support, but we do provide a manual, professional video tutorials and
forums where our support staff happily answer questions throughout the day free of charge. The problem we have started to see is that people will download our free product, then also demand free chat/telephone support to help them install and set it up. When we politely redirect these requests to our forums, or paid support options, our staff are often being verbally assaulted and accused of carrying out some sort of scam among other expletives. In addition to that we are noticing an increased number of negative reviews on the download/review sites claiming that we don't offer support for our product, which has started to have a direct affect on our bottom line. While our overall paying customer satisifaction level is extremely high, its gotten to the point where we are considering abondoning the free product altogether as it seems to be doing more harm than good. Have other similar companies experienced this issue? What would be a better way to handle support for a free product that is still economically viable?"

Comment: When I was a kid... (Score 2) 319

by IpSo_ (#38091898) Attached to: Toronto School Bans Hard Balls

We used to use these so called "hard" balls explicitly to throw at people with the intent to hit them. I believe they called it a "game"... Ball tag?

Schools will attempt to ban any and everything that could possibly be fun even if there is no chance of someone getting hurt (trading hockey cards was banned from my elementary school), its ridiculous.

Comment: That was my impression... (Score 3, Interesting) 336

by IpSo_ (#36528512) Attached to: Android App Quality Pathetically Low Says Developer

I purchased a Motorola Xoom (my first Android device) about a month after it came out... Wow was I ever disappointed. It would crash several times an hour just browsing the web (especially on Motorola's own Xoom website), but I chalked that up to "being an early adopter". Then I started downloading apps from the Android market and things got even worse, if the app even loaded without crashing, I felt like I was teleported back to the late 90's from a design / look & feel standpoint. Other than the rare exceptions ( Angry Birds ) every app I downloaded didn't even compare to a similar app on Apple's App Store, it felt like companies/developers were publishing an app for Android just to say they did it, without the intention of it actually being used. Many apps that did have an iOS counterpart (*cough* thinkorswim *cough*) hadn't been updated in almost a year and were pathetic at best.

Needless to say after two weeks of torture I took it back and purchased an iPad2, I've been quite happy with it.

Hopefully in a few years it will be a different story, I would much prefer if Apple had some decent competition.

Comment: Rolling releases make *a lot* more sense to me... (Score 1) 246

by IpSo_ (#34333810) Attached to: Ubuntu May Move To Rolling Releases

Release early, release often... In my opinion its worked great for the Kernel folks since v2.6 was released. Does anyone remember the hell that was upgrading from 2.2 to 2.4, and again to 2.6?

The more things that change at once, the greater the pain will be, its as simple as that. Holding back all changes and releasing them all at once with a major version upgrade causes the most pain as possible, and people are reluctant to actually upgrade, so testing is limited.

Instead if they release small changes more often, they will get more testing as more people are willing to risk an upgrade if only a small number of changes occurred, and if something does break, its limited in scope. The key here is that you try not to upgrade too many important parts of the system at once. For instance Xorg should probably never be upgraded at the same time as KDE/Gnome if possible.

For example, if Apache releases a new major version, you can send that out and if something breaks, its pretty easy to roll-back or fix the issue, since only Apache was changed and maybe a couple other minor things.

Instead if you upgrade to a new version of the entire distro, if Apache breaks you don't know if its directly related to Apache, or one of the other 1000 packages on the system. It makes troubleshooting, bug tracking and quality control much more difficult.

Comment: On-Demand content trumps all... (Score 1) 180

by IpSo_ (#32296448) Attached to: Local TV Could Go the Way of Newspapers

Its just a matter of time before TV as we know it will go away in favor of something that is completely On-Demand, which the internet is currently king at providing. Some cable companies have their own On-Demand service, but its horrible at best, and they often charge outrageous amounts for it.

I've had a MythTV box running since about 2001, and prior to that I never owned a TV at all. As cable TV switches from analog to digital with restrictions on what you can/cannot record and the requirement of pricey incompatible set top boxes, it won't be long before MythTV fails to work as well. At that point I will likely drop my cable TV entirely and hopefully Google TV or some other alternative will suffice by then, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

The bottom line is that broadcasting programs at specific times of the day is just horrible practice to begin with. People are too busy nowadays and their schedules fluctuate too much. Who wants to schedule their life around the next episode of "Lost" (gag), only to accidentally miss one and be completely "lost" for the rest of the season.

Luckily for them, most cable TV companies offer the internet as well, because eventually TV subscriptions will disappear along with a vast portion of their revenue.

Comment: Re:The experience isn't actually any better (Score 1) 177

by IpSo_ (#32126228) Attached to: Scribd Switches To HTML5

Yup, same experience for me too.

Their flash viewer is nice and smooth with scrolling, supports search and works quite well.

The HTML5 viewer is horrible slow (using Chrome on a quad-core Linux box) and doesn't even support search.

Apparently "just got better" means something entirely different to them then to their users.

Comment: Re:HTML5 isn't quite there yet... (Score 1) 944

by IpSo_ (#32033872) Attached to: Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"

Everyone of those sites would be much better if they were done in Flash, likely many times faster too. Two of the three virtually froze my browser entirely, and the "presentation" one took over one second to respond to my keypress to turn to the next slide. (Firefox 3.6.5 on Linux)

Again, its not about HTML5 not being able to do what Flash can currently, its about which is better at it *right now*. Flash is hands down the winner there, and the snails pace that is browser innovation means that this will likely stay that way for many years to come.

Comment: Re:HTML5 isn't quite there yet... (Score 1) 944

by IpSo_ (#32033756) Attached to: Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"

If you read my post you would notice that I didn't say these things *couldn't* be done in HTML5, I just said that HTML5 and its tools have a *long* way to go to catch up to Flash.

I mean, if you really wanted to, you could write a game engine in ASM, and it would be the "fastest game in the world". That doesn't mean it makes sense to do it, and virtually no one does it these days *for a reason*.

Eventually I see entire web-sites turning into just HTML5 canvas applications to get the necessary features they need, which the end result is basically identical to what Flash offers right now, only with a plugin. At this point it will be all about the developments tools.

The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?

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