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Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird
MozSource has launched
an email support service for Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla
at a rate of $4.99 per incident.
"MozSource, the independent company that operates the Mozilla Store and the Netscape Store, today announced the launch of its new high-quality, affordable technical support service for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.7.
Available from http://support.mozsource.com, end-user email support for the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird email client and the Mozilla 1.7 Internet suite will be provided by an experienced team of support professionals who have years of experience with Mozilla-based products."
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Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 17:54 UTC (Tue) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link] One of the great things in OSS is the fast connection between users and developers via mailing lists. "Users" get the warm fuzzy feeling that their woes are heard, and "developers" get to find out in which unexpected way their application does not work.
Hopefully, this support offering will not replace the above feedback loop.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 20:27 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] I will respectfully disagree on this one. While it is quite true that there have been times that I have gotten an amazingly quick and helpful response from a developer, there have been just as many times that I have been left wondering if my emails were even getting through to the list.
e.g. I have posted 2 trouble reports to the NX mailing list. I posted one message, waited a considerate 2 weeks, and then reposted. The response? Nothing really. Someone did report that it "worked for them" on Suse 9.2. The problems still exist for my users on a variety of machines. My solution has been to go back to VNC, which is slower, but works. Had I been of a different mindset and in a different situation, I might have "gone back" to Windows Terminal Services. Support is important. i.e. Support is like sex. It's best when it's free. But "pay for" is better than nothing at all. Well, OK. Maybe not. ;-)
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 20:40 UTC (Tue) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link] True, I have also sometimes been left alone when asking a question or reporting a particularly annoying bug to a mailing list. Well, I got their software and hard work for Free, so who am I to complain about someone else's choices. In other cases, I got a prompt answer with a workaround.
Contrast this with my Apple support experiences, software for which I paid. I did encounter a number of really nasty bugs in a piece of - for me - critical software. Did I ever get a response? No. Was there ever a bugfix update since I reported the problems? No. Could I fix it myself? No. But, I was free to find a workaround.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 21:38 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] After posting, It occurred to me that my post seemed a bit too negative, as I did not mention that "pay for" support is not a guarantee of a solution, only of some sort of response. (Any user of "paid support" no doubt has vivid memories of the many time wasting, "non-answers" they have received.) My bad. However, a variety of support options can only be a plus.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 21:11 UTC (Tue) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] NX is commercial software, last I looked, so your point doesn't really apply to actual free software projects. Usually I get excellent help from developer lists, and if I don't I often find help on user lists or in archives. Commercial software is another thing altogether: I have never gotten useful support from VMWare (if ($user eq 'jwb') { echo "Debian not supported"; }), but I have found great support from VMWare users. Ditto for Eagle and ATI.
Speaking of archives, software developers and especially commercial software vendors should realize that the various forms of web forums are not adequate for fostering a user community. Mailing lists with a good, continuous, searchable archive like MARC are far superior to UBB and the like, and a permanently-archived USENET feed is even better.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 21:38 UTC (Tue) by vblum (subscriber, #1151) [Link] > Mailing lists with a good, continuous, searchable archive like MARC are far> superior to UBB and the like, and a permanently-archived USENET feed is > even better.
Yes!
However: In that case, I would have found out that Apple's Keynote has rather nasty bugs which are not being fixed, and would not have bought the product in the first place. That may well be why they don't communicate with their users.
[Sorry. I couldn't resist adding that, despite having posted too much already.]
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 22:01 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] NX is commercial, Free/Open-Source software.
I often get excellent help from developer lists, as well. Though "usually" is perhaps a stronger term than I would choose.
Why are you making a distiction between commercial and FOSS? Do you mean "commercial" and "noncommercial"?
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 22:09 UTC (Tue) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] I'm making that distinction because, for whatever reason, software that is also the product of some company has much worse support than software not primarily someone's product. For example PostgreSQL's mailing lists provide good support while mysql's mailing lists do not. And Red Hat's mailing lists are singularly useless compared with Debian's.
Perhaps the effect is really one of popularity, where the MySQLs and Red Hats of the world have too many clueless newbie users cluttering up the lists. But I think there's something about a business organization that renders it incapable of providing good, clueful support.
Counterexamples welcome.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 23:49 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I dont find your comment that redhat mailing lists are useless very objective. In general redhat/fedora tends to attract newbies many of them contributing to the noise seen in the list but many of them are very helpful including several redhat developers.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 15, 2004 1:57 UTC (Wed) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] In the early days of MySQL (1999 or so and before) I was actually able to read every single message on the mailing lists. When this was the case the sound to noise ratio was outstanding.
The problem with the mailing list model is it doesn't scale beyond a certain point. Which is where commercial support comes in. The nice thing about the open source model is that you don't have to depend on one support vendor. There is the potential for multiple companies to offer support. Competition being a good thing means you might even be able to find a company that will provide you with quality technical support. And if one day they stop doing so you can try out others.
This is one of many reasons I think the OSS model is going to win out in the end. The only hope for companies like Microsoft is that they can use their billions of dollars to put up sufficient legal hurdles to stop this evolutionary process. Or they could take a radical approach and adapt. I predict they'll try the first until they are certain of failure then rapidly switch to the second.
Professional Support for Firefox and Thunderbird Posted Dec 14, 2004 18:30 UTC (Tue) by freethinker (guest, #4397) [Link] Must be a scam. Everyone knows Open Source tools are unsupported :)
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