3 ms·

I agree that the bounty-stye approach works well for encouraging new development. I'm thinking about the times when you get stuck: the community boards often do

I agree that the bounty-stye approach works well for encouraging new development. I'm thinking about the times when you get stuck: the community boards often do not have exactly what you need and it can be tough to explain your issue and slow to need to wait for replies. In these cases, having a synchronous discussion with the right person could save a lot of time. For smaller projects, I think a pay-per-time approach would work better than support contracts.

__d 8y ago
From a FOSS-user point of view, having a pre-established commercial relationship is good: no-one wants to get approval to spend money on a per-incident basis. After that, having a per-hour model to get good-quality support would be good. If there was a place that I could find someone with the right expertise, recommendations, etc. As a maintainer, this would fine too. I'd likely not offer paid support myself -- I have limited time available, and I'd rather be looking after the small queries, and doing the development I want to do rather than doing paid support work, but I'd be really happy for someone else to get paid to do it. I should point out that this has been tried before ... see Cygnus Support, LinuxCare, etc, etc. I don't know of any recent attempts though.