On Apr 6, 2009, at 10:07 PM, Kyle Cordes wrote:
>
> Luke Kanies wrote:
>> As is probably obvious, I've scaled back my free online support and
>> my
>> attempts at fixing every bug ever, but a certain amount is still
>
> There is dangerous territory nearby: Paying customers have a higher
> expectation of a smooth out-of-box-experience, than open source users;
> to make this happen it is necessary to debug vigorously. However, open
> source users tend to chafe at the thought of a "community" version
> intentionally left buggy while a "pay" version is fixed. I think the
> only clean way out of this is a lot of debugging.
Yep, it's essentially a ridiculous balance to try to find, especially
since the third leg of the balance (after revenue and community) is my
own life. I seem to sacrificing it rather than the other two, and I'm
trying to find a better balance between them all.
I don't think I'm doing great at any of them, and my wife would
certainly agree, but I'm constantly tuning it. I've been spending
more effort on the lists recently (albeit in chunks).
And, of course, I remain committed to keeping Puppet itself as stable
as possible, but the definition of "stable" is always open to
definition, unfortunately.
>
> Related to this, I can tell you from personal experience in commercial
> software: support costs can be an enormously drain. The most effective
> way to keep them down is with relentless quality improvement: kill
> bugs,
> make features more comprehensible, document, make failure modes
> gentle,
> make errors clear, etc.
Considering how many people have told me they don't buy support
because they find Puppet so easy that they just don't need help, I'm
not too concerned about this yet.
--
The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to
make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him
untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
-- Henry L. Stimson
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
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