I thought that maybe http://www.wordpress.com would offer support, as they offer commerical hosting. I had a look at their support page and got this message:
“Support will be closed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday while the Automattic crew gathers in San Francisco in preparation for WordCamp 2007. We will re-open Monday morning around 9AM PDT.”. LOL, point taken.

P.S. You’ve got Nick Hebb’s name wrong, the downside of spell checking?

Okay, point taken. Now, having just espoused the capitalism credo, when will we get the chance to pay you for help ? Or at least see the details of what such an arrangement might look like ?

I applaud you wanting to get it right the first time, but, I think there are plenty other tentative MicroISV(s) who would throw money at you to make their insecurities (their problems) go away.

Thanks for taking the leap into this new consultancy.

I see this as more of a rant about WordPress support rather than Open Source support in general.
There are many many open source projects that have commercial support available.
Saying that, I haven’t seen a website that lists open source projects that have commercial support.
That would be handy for people when choosing software.

Ray Smith

Bob,

That’s exactly my pet peeve with open source as well. One example of this is the server part of Subversion. The client side of Subversion is covered very well. The server side, not so well.

I had a huge pain when administrating my Subversion server on my Windows server box. I got tired of fumbling around, so I created a nice MMC snapin to manage the sever bits. I’m about to launch in about a couple months.

Using Subversion, awesome. Getting paid to support it, priceless.

So, let me sum it up:

1. You have bad experience with the approach of WordPress folks and quickly generalize it to Open Source in general. Nice thinking here.

2. You complain that there’s no way to pay for support, yet when you are pointed to the place where there *is* paid support, you dismiss it because… I don’t know, looks totally irrational to me. And you arrive to the conclusion that your dislike for writing emails is somehow *WordPress’s* fault? Come on.

Interesting article.

From a users point of view you are 100% correct - you want the support when you need it and are willing to pay for it.

Your frustration has lessons for every ISV.

Customer support is a notoriously difficult thing to get right. It is resource hungry activity that doesnt have the ’sex appeal’ that e.g. product development has - which is why so many projects (open-source and proprietary) fail to get it right.

Interestingly, many open-source projects actively encourage third-party developers to sell support as a commercial service, allowing the software to be released for free under a GPL license.

This is a relatively new space but one which I believe offers lots of opportunities for the micro-ISV community.

I agree with your religious analogy - I do think these debates are sometimes driven more by ideology than anything else.
Checkout the debate currently raging in the Joomla! CMS project around the issue of third-party developers offering proprietary extensions to the open-source CMS (http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?board=48.0) WARNING: its not pretty:)

I use a lot of open-source software and have come to realize that its a mixed bag - some projects are mature, stable software with an active support system, and some are not! either way, if you are going to use open-source then I think you have to accept that at some point you will have to pop the hood and fix the thing yourself.

BTW. I just Googled “wordpress paid for support” and found at least one solution for you on page one..

Don’t you just love this Internet thingy

I agree with you!
Open Software or Free Software or whatever these guys call it, it’s just SUCKS…

I have one friend at work his Open Source fan, I alwasy have argument with him about just the concept of FREE Software.

The world dosn’t need Open Software or Free Software, what the world needs is QUALITY, GOOD software, there is nothing wrong for selling your knowlage for money, all MD they do this all time and no one asks for FREE Private Doctors…

All these things about “Free as code not as beer” …I sell business solutions, how in the world I will give my customer the source code for my accounting software I sell it to him/her?? First of all “IT”S NOT WORTH IT” the customer will never care, he/she simply needs the work to get done! Nothing more, forget about the source code!!

What freedom the customer will have from giving him/her my source code!!! Is that will make him/her happy??? Or giving him my full time support and provide him with latest updates.

I’m sorry if I sound angry, in fact I am, because these guys from Open/Free Source world they want me to feel bad about myself just because I ask money for my own work! My software!

The world will not be a better place if we all go Open/Free software…the world will be a better place IF we all do a good job of whatever we’re doing in business…and provide high quality products with reasonable prices…

That’s the most important thing!

Bob,

Aren’t there any commercial blogging packages that you can use that would include paid support? Why use Word Press at all if the open-source model isn’t working for you?

–Kevin

Nick Herb -> Nick Hebb

I would like to point out that there are quite a few companies who do make money centered around providing services and derivative products for open source software (redhat, mysql come to mind) and many others selling software services based on open source software (37 signals and numerous other web base services using OSS to run their applications). So I think a better title perhaps would be “Why WordPress Sucks…”.

Cheers,
Greg

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Maybe they heard you A few minutes with Google, and I found this commercial WordPress support site. http://automattic.com/services/support-network/

I would add a suggestion for a micro-ISV: build an online business around managing the technical stuff for installing blog upgrades, backing up databases, and installing new themes.

I spend way too much time doing this sort of stuff and not enough time being able to write.

On the free support: dead on. I can eventually figure it out through trial and error — the key word being “eventually.” I don’t want to spend the time and the effort to trial and error — and recover — my way to a solution. I want something fixed or done.

The world has come to free support and I now need to be an expert in everything.

Paid support: I left a hosting company because the support received was no better than the self-help files. If the paid support isn’t good, then I walk. So providing paid support has risks as most everyone loves to be cheap when support is done.

We are a self-service world. Can I flip my own burgers at McDonald’s?

I believe you’ve got a misprint. The gentleman that operates BreezeTree is Nick Hebb, not Herb.

Thanks,
Charlie

Thanks Charlie - You’re right and it should be fixed as of now.

Ray, Fred & Kevin -

I like WordPress - I really do. And commercial (read TypePad) have issues - something disrupted their hosting service’s power this afternoon for several hours.

What got me was the holier than thou attitude of the people who run that forum - money is somehow a dirty thing and we don’t want any part of that. Fine if that works for them - but what about the rest of us?

As John pointed out, there are companies realizing there’s a need here - but so far, only for enterprise size ventures prepared to spend $5K or $10K. There’s a huge opportunity here for microISVs who can figure out a way to turn their WordPress (and other Open Source) expertise into products and services.