David Elliott wrote:
On 2002.02.16 18:58 Roger Fujii wrote: [SNIP]
don't know about that. Considering their cost of goods conceptually is zero... As for support, I don't see it ever being a panacea for the industry. Various models for support have already been tried by commerical companies with varying levels of success. However, there's a really bad side to this model, as it puts the economic incentive on generating support calls - which means that there is LESS incentive for fixing bugs (even in site support, you're less apt to buy it if the program is trouble free).
Actually, there would be an economic incentive to NOT have support calls. Support calls cost money. If people don't call you with support calls that are clearly your fault (i.e. a bug) then you make more money.
This only hold true for a productized model, where you pay for something in advance. If you pay for product, then support for it usually subtracts from the profit and it is a cost of doing business. This does have the economic incentive in the "right" place because you want to minimize the number of support calls (though it hasn't stopped companies like M$ who has monopoly powers). However, in a PURE support model (ie, not one based on making money up front by a sale and must have a revenue stream all its own), you basically have 2 choices: 1) Charge by the incident 2) Offer site support
With #1, support calls MAKE money. If you have a problem-free product, it subracts from #2 (and #1 for the matter). In either case, the incentive is in the "wrong" place because your revenue stream is going to depend on people having problems...
Of course you're right, there still is incentive to want people to at least pay for support which you can hope they'd be more willing to do if you give them some reason to do so. Introducing bugs for this purpose would surely backfire as you'd get more calls than you could afford to pay for.
I wasn't implying that people would sabotage products. I was only trying to point out that the much hearlded support model for open source projects is not nearly as good as people make it out to be.
-r