My vision for Open Source pro support
-
A relatively (longer than I expected) article where I share about my vision of Open Source support:
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/05/06/my-vision-for-open-source-pro-support/
If you have comments or reactions, feel free to share here
-
@olivierlambert A very good article Olivier, thanks for that !
I agree with all that points, as I have worked for a company providing support for Open Source projects, it's a such huge value to get strong beliefs and actions to allow customers to choose one or more approach and support for this to be more like a candle than hand cuffs.
-
@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:
A relatively (longer than I expected) article where I share about my vision of Open Source support:
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/05/06/my-vision-for-open-source-pro-support/
If you have comments or reactions, feel free to share here
From a business point of view I have a hard to time seeing the value proposition.
Fixed price support per host may support customer success but not really in this case. Compare for example to MSPs that deploy open source all the time. They manage your service/systems/software for you so you don't have to. With a fixed price you know exactly what you're getting. The customer goals and the MSPs goals are completely aligned.
That is not the case here because with a standard support contract for xcp-ng you are actually not getting anything. So there is zero value - unless you have a problem you can't solve yourself. Then there is some value.
My old workplace had about 20 xcp-ng hosts. We haven't needed any support in the last five years. I'm sure we would not have payed 5 x 20 x 600 EUR = 60,000 EUR because someday we might need some support. The value just isn't there.
You probably have different type of customers and they value different things. So support options would need to be different to appeal to different customers - if you want their business.
For example I'm pretty sure there are a lot of customers out there that want managed services. They want their virtualization hosts to be patched and running as they should.
-
If you don't see the value, then I failed to convince you. But it doesn't mean there's no value.
It's like you missed the entire point of the article: support is FAR more than just having assistance when you have a problem. Did you really read it?edit: your old workplace was then free riding, which is fine until a majority will free ride too. Then, this is causing death of the project.
Not understand why paying for a core software running literally your company is a bit beyond me
Just the risk not having important patches on time worth the amount to prevent it. -
If I had XCP-NG running in production, those prices are not at all terrible and as a manager it makes me feel far better knowing I can call someone. @olivierlambert do you have published SLA's somewhere (I might have missed it so apologies).
-
-
@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:
Not understand why paying for a core software running literally your company is a bit beyond me
That's why I wrote my post, trying to fix that problem for you. You wanted feedback on your blog post. I truly want the xcp-ng project to succeed.
The problem isn't that someone doesn't want to pay. The problem is what the seller is offering something that isn't valuable enough to motivate the cost or is only offering something that the buyer doesn't want or need.
And the value of something is in relation to every other solution to the problem.
So my old workplace wasn't paying for support by giving money away on a support contract, but they were paying for support by employing staff that could manage their systems. They also commissioned work from open source developers from time to time. And I'm sure they would have been glad to pay for incident based support - if ever needed.
-
@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:
If you don't see the value, then I failed to convince you. But it doesn't mean there's no value.
It's like you missed the entire point of the article: support is FAR more than just having assistance when you have a problem. Did you really read it?No, I didn't miss it. In your standard support offering there is nothing proactive. There is nothing about setup assistance or anything. There is only send-us-an-email-and-we'll-get-back-to-you-the-next-business-day.
Or is there more to it that isn't on the homepage?
-
Don't get me wrong: constructive feedback is ALWAYS welcome
This is just the pricing "cards", but there's already the information that you have initial setup assistance, upgrade help and direct access to XCP-ng devs. Sounds more than just "send us an email when you need". What would you have wrote then?Also, regarding not paying the project but hire people to contribute on it: I'm very fine with it!
