#opensource is not a charity

By Greg Turnquist

Greg L. Turnquist worked on the Spring team for over thirteen years and is a senior staff technical content engineer at Cockroach Labs. He was the lead for Spring Data JPA and Spring Web Services. He wrote Packt's best-selling title, Learning Spring Boot 2.0 2nd Edition, and its 3rd Edition follow-up along many others.

March 23, 2016

clock-with-a-questionLogging onto my laptop this morning, I have already seen two tickets opened by different people clamoring for SOMEONE to address their stackoverflow question. They appeared to want an answer to their question NOW. The humor in all this is that the issue itself is only seven hours old, with the person begging for a response when their question is barely three hours old. Sorry, but open source is not a charity.

gordonBatPhoneIf you have a critical issue, perhaps you should think about paying for support. It’s what other customers need when they want a priority channel. It definitely isn’t free as in no-cost. Something that doesn’t work is opening a ticket with nothing more than a link to your question.

question-not-answeredOpen source has swept the world. If you don’t get onboard to using it, you risk being left in the dust. But too many think that open source is free, free, FREE. That is not the case. Open source means you can access the source code. Optimally, you have the ability to tweak, edit, refine, and possibly send back patches. But nowhere in there is no-cost support.

pivotal-ossIn a company committed to open source, we focus on building relationships with various communities. The Spring Framework has grown hand over fist in adoption and driven much of how the Java community builds apps today. Pivotal Cloud Foundry frequently has other companies sending in people to pair with us. It’s a balancing act when trying to coach users to not assume their question will be answered instantly.

helpingI frequent twitter, github, stackoverflow, and other forums to try and interact with the community. If at all possible, I shoot to push something through. Many times, if we’re talking about a one-line change, it’s even easier. But at the end of the day, I have to draw a line and focus on priorities. This can irk some members not aware of everything I’m working on. That is a natural consequence.

Hopefully, as open source continues to grow, we can also mature people’s expectations between paid and un-paid support. Cheers!

P.S. For a little while longer, there is a coupon code to Learning Spring Boot for 50% off (Python Testing Cookbook as well!)

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