When you're doing commercial product development, don't use "gifts". The FOSS tool/product may be very nice, very thorough, and all kinds of other wonderous "and it's free too!" adjectives; remember that it is, as the article says, a "gift": its creator and maintainer is under no obligation to ensure your needs are met. It may overall be a tremendous tour-de-force, but remember there is one key difference between FOSS and commercial software: there are small, ugly, uninteresting BUT IMPORTANT parts which NOBODY wants to do short of a serious paycheck. When your product comes to rely on those parts, will fixing problems prompt a "ok, I'll put 3 engineers on overtime to get it done" or "I'm at the beach; be happy with what you've got - it's a gift, remember?"
Yes, but have you had any commercial vendor say "Ok, I'll put 3 engineers on it"? Unless there are 100 other customers with the same problem you have, your bug report will be put on the list that they'll eventually get to in a month or 6.
For commercial products, your only option is to threaten to pull your business. Since it would probably cost thousands or tens of thousands to fix your problem, unless you are a big customer or the problem affects a lot of other customers, your problem will not be a priority.
For open source, you have the following options:
- ask the author to fix it. This works surprisingly well, if you're polite.
- post a question to the projects mailing list, and you will usually receive a response
- fix it yourself
- pay somebody to fix it
- pay the original author to fix it
Notice that there is ALWAYS a potential solution. Sometimes it's expensive, but for commercial software, too often you are SOL.
Comments
...which is a variant on my take of the article:
When you're doing commercial product development, don't use "gifts". The FOSS tool/product may be very nice, very thorough, and all kinds of other wonderous "and it's free too!" adjectives; remember that it is, as the article says, a "gift": its creator and maintainer is under no obligation to ensure your needs are met. It may overall be a tremendous tour-de-force, but remember there is one key difference between FOSS and commercial software: there are small, ugly, uninteresting BUT IMPORTANT parts which NOBODY wants to do short of a serious paycheck. When your product comes to rely on those parts, will fixing problems prompt a "ok, I'll put 3 engineers on overtime to get it done" or "I'm at the beach; be happy with what you've got - it's a gift, remember?"
Yes, but have you had any commercial vendor say "Ok, I'll put 3 engineers on it"? Unless there are 100 other customers with the same problem you have, your bug report will be put on the list that they'll eventually get to in a month or 6.
For commercial products, your only option is to threaten to pull your business. Since it would probably cost thousands or tens of thousands to fix your problem, unless you are a big customer or the problem affects a lot of other customers, your problem will not be a priority.
For open source, you have the following options:
- ask the author to fix it. This works surprisingly well, if you're polite. - post a question to the projects mailing list, and you will usually receive a response - fix it yourself - pay somebody to fix it - pay the original author to fix it
Notice that there is ALWAYS a potential solution. Sometimes it's expensive, but for commercial software, too often you are SOL.