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I feel like it's weird to first talk about aligning your incentives towards things that provide value to your users, and then suggest this business model: > Tr

I feel like it's weird to first talk about aligning your incentives towards things that provide value to your users, and then suggest this business model: > Training, support or consulting services from the project’s maintainers without even mentioning that it creates exactly the opposite incentive. If you get paid to help people understand how to get stuff done with your product, you have absolutely no reason to improve the core product in ways that make it easy for them to figure it out on their own.

dencodev 6y ago
Your core product is something that needs to be popular enough that anyone needs your services though, and it's not going to be popular if it's difficult to learn and navigate.
- teraflop 6y ago
  That's true, but that's exactly why this strategy can be so detrimental to the long-term health of a project. The core product has to be just barely good enough to solve a problem for enough people; once it gets popular, it can coast on that momentum for a while, even as it ossifies. I can think of a number of projects in the "big data" space that seem to have fallen into this trap.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  It also has to outcompete other products that do the same thing. That's not going to happen if your product is a baroque mess that requires a ton of support in order to use/setup/understand compared to other competing products. Ideally, your product is as easy to use as possible compared to other products, yet complex enough to require support. Anyway, many corporations will buy support as a matter of course, whether they need it or not. And if they want specific features they might pay to have them added rather than dedicate their own engineers to writing and maintaining that code, especially if they don't have the in-house expertise to do so.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Actually you do, stuff you do can be rolled back into your project. Not everything is binary. You can enjoy hacking on a project as well as making money on it.

dencodev 6y ago

Your core product is something that needs to be popular enough that anyone needs your services though, and it's not going to be popular if it's difficult to learn and navigate.

teraflop 6y ago
That's true, but that's exactly why this strategy can be so detrimental to the long-term health of a project. The core product has to be just barely good enough to solve a problem for enough people; once it gets popular, it can coast on that momentum for a while, even as it ossifies. I can think of a number of projects in the "big data" space that seem to have fallen into this trap.
pmoriarty 6y ago
It also has to outcompete other products that do the same thing. That's not going to happen if your product is a baroque mess that requires a ton of support in order to use/setup/understand compared to other competing products. Ideally, your product is as easy to use as possible compared to other products, yet complex enough to require support. Anyway, many corporations will buy support as a matter of course, whether they need it or not. And if they want specific features they might pay to have them added rather than dedicate their own engineers to writing and maintaining that code, especially if they don't have the in-house expertise to do so.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Actually you do, stuff you do can be rolled back into your project. Not everything is binary. You can enjoy hacking on a project as well as making money on it.