In his summary What I learned from OSBC 2008, Matt Asay commented on how we align open source business models with customer satisfaction (and willingness to pay".   According to Matt:

Enterprises love open source but the business models necessary to fuel both their happiness and that of the vendors still need a lot of work.

Jon Williams of Kaplan Test suggested in his keynote, as Dirk Hohndel captures, that the more happy he is with his commercial open-source software, the less likely he will be to pay for it. Why? Because his developers will acquire the expertise over time to support themselves and because the product will mature to the point that support will be less necessary.

The vendor can respond in two ways: Innovation and proprietization (made up word). By innovation, Jon suggested that continual development of the product keeps it buggy (my word, not his) and out in front of his developers, such that support remains relevant. Vendors can also offer services like the JBoss Operations Network that make maintenance of the software easier.

A combination of both is optimal, but Dirk is right that it's a bit depressing, this prospect of the customer leaving just when you've made them the happiest. 

 I've been thinking about this topic a lot, and especially how we can provide value around support. 

Like many people in the open source world, I spent many years working for proprietary enterprise software companies — mostly startups but also a few large companies like Hyperion and PeopleSoft.  During my time at the larger proprietary software companies, I saw how support teams were very eager to point fingers at other vendors and play the "blame game".  If they could feasibly point at the database or the operating system or the custom code written by the customer, they were very happy to declare it "not our problem".  Part of the reason for this approach was that the support teams didn't really have enough expertise in all of the components and infrastructure that worked around their own product and didn't want to spend the time and effort needed to troubleshoot a problem that could end up being in "someone else's code".

In the open source world, the support problem gets more challenging.  In the area where OpenLogic plays (above the operating system and below the business applications), companies are typically combining many open source packages, custom code and proprietary solutions to create their critical business applications.  Yet in these large companies, the expertise for each of these components is highly distributed.  There's an app server team, a database team, an infrastructure team, a network team (you get the picture) and often there's no one at the company that has the complete picture of how all of the components work together or, more importantly, why they are not working properly. 

At OpenLogic, We find that our engineers providing support need to have superior troubleshooting skills in order to follow the problems through the whole system to find the root cause.  That also means being willing and able to cross boundaries between products (even when they were not bundled by the vendor) to solve the customer problem – wherever it lies.  In fact, we rarely find that the problem is a bug in the open source package.  Most often we find that is some configuration or integration issue, or a problem with how all of the pieces interoperate.  When we solve these types of issues for customers, they are thrilled, ecstatic and grateful.  They are happy that someone is helping solve their business problem – regardless of its source. 

This wasn't something we fully appreciated two years ago when we first launched our support offering, but I think this lesson is an important one for all open source companies.  Just as open source has brought new, more transparent ways to engage with customers around product development, open source also brings new ways to engage with customers around support.  By breaking through narrow product silos, we can increase our value to customers and fuel customer happiness with open source companies and the services they provide.