scorp1us's Journal: Blame Monkey Corp

A lot of objection to OSS in the workplace rests on the community support aspect. While I find community support to be superior to commercial support, businesses still like to have a blame monkey. (This is the ??? in the step before "4) and Profit" open source business scheme)

Here's my idea. Create a company that is the blame monkey. There's some bug in KDE. A company needs it fixed. Call Blame Monkey Corp (BMC). Pay them what's you'd pay for the software to start your account. Describe the bug to them. Blame Monkey Corp finds a code money and says 'get it fixed'. BMC appoints you (the code monkey) as bug master - it's up to you to get it fixed. They exchange contact info betweent he money and the company. When the bug is resolved, the monkey submits the patch to the appropriate vendor, and patches the customer's computer. Then BMC awards a portion of the support licence to you. Some of it is kept for BMC operating expenses, pay the BMC managers, and to pay idle blame monkeys for new adding new features.

Companies buy support licenses (entitlements) for the applications they select. These are non-refunable fees. I expect most to go unused. You can't buy a license then ask for a feature and expect it to get done - only bugs. But you can submit feature requests for idle code monkeys. BMC coordinates resources and is responsible for distrbuting money to the monkeys. No payout is done if someone not in that BMC does not fix the problem.

One BMC should be enough, but there is a possibilty for many. BMCs can compete with each other on support fees, response times and monkey pay-out rates. They can also pre-release new features to clients before the patches make it out to a release. One BMC might pride itself on features, another short resolution times. Another might be damn cheap.

This would fix that there's only community support and no one to blame situation that companies are so leary of.