Be nice. It's a fscking gift

It's funny how often software is priced according to the anticipated support burden, but users feel entitled to support regardless of the price. I once worked at a financial analytics software company and our end users were non-technical, but paid about 2K a month for a username and password, and very often the users were kind and apologetic in their support requests. I also have a personal software product that costs $5/mo with a free trial, and many people trialing it are quite impatient and high maintenance. My take-away: if you are setting yourself up for an end-user support role, make sure it's priced accordingly.

Back when I worked at a small retail computer store, I never ceased to be amazed by silly old men (and they were almost complete carbon copies of each other) who would drive an F250 pickup for an hour to save $5 on a mouse (our loss leader) and then do it <i>again</i> to come back and complain.<p>My favorite incident was when my boss offered the guy a cash refund. That wasn't good enough. My boss offered him the refund, <i>and let him keep the mouse for free</i> just to get him out of the store. He smiled, finally satisfied, <i>and then asked to buy another one</i>.

If a person appears, offering me a solution to get me to my destination, leads me down their ally, taking my time and attention and meaning I lose the opportunity to check other solutions, and at the end of the ally I fall into a muddy riverbank and see a sign saying 'TODO: build bridge', we wouldn't call <i>that</i> a gift, we'd call it deceitful and cruel (or worse).<p>You don't owe me your work, but I don't owe you gratitude for it either. It's not a gift, it's not even that transactional. (Although that's no excuse for being nasty or threatening!)

'Gift' is a word I wish I saw more often in the vicinity of 'open source'. I love open source software. I love that there can be a community around any project, no matter how small. It's a powerful philosophy.<p>But I wish more people would understand the differences between 'free' and 'open source'. Open source software is not free. Huge companies invest millions of dollars into open source projects that you probably use. Time is money.<p>Looking at is as a gift not only makes you understand the generosity with which the author(s) has open sourced their code, but when I think about it like that I see that there are real people behind the code and that they should be treated as such.<p>A good lesson.

I am always disappointed when I see people complain (with a negative tone) about a library, whether it's missing documentation or an unstable API or whatever, without contacting the author of the library and asking how's the project doing or would the author need some help. Sometimes the author is burdened by other projects or paying work but would probably appreciate any contact from fellow developers or potential users to discuss/plan ahead the project. A little positive feedback or a few pull requests from strangers makes good things happen.<p>in short: It's open source. You're a coder. Fix it.

Honestly I'd like to see the e-mails that were sent if only for personal amusement.<p>I have so much respect for those that work on open source projects. If you think about it there isn't much on the web today that isn't in some way touched by some open source code.

I have to admit, by the end, the OP's responses were classier than mine would have been. Kudos to you.<p>I'll never understand the sense of entitlement that says you must drop everything you are doing and pay attention to me and only me.

I've been once on the other side of the "be nice, it's a f####ng gift" situation.<p>I had a subscription at a local telecom company, which provided both telephony and broadband internet. I went and cancelled the subscription in July 2010, and almost a year later, in June 2011 I get called by a repo company asking for $20. After a few calls, I find out that the telecom company issued one more bill, 3 months after I cancelled. Apparently, they gave me for free when I cancelled another 3 free months of phone subscription, which automatically extended the broadband internet connection. Arguing with them over the phone (I had left the country by then) I got this exact reply: "It's a f####ng gift, be nice! What's your problem?"<p>The way this works in my country (Romania), if you don't pay up, you either have to sue them to prove you don't have to pay, or you get reported to the credit bureau so you won't get any loans from any bank for the next few years. Sadly, I ended up paying ...

One time, on my (free) browser game, we banned a user for gross misbehaviour. A few mails went back and forth between him and me, ending up with him threatening to "sue us into the ground", and his dad was "a lawyer" so he was sure he'd win. I replied something along the lines of "sure, whatever" and never heard back.

I suspect you'd also have this sort of thing with a paid product. The only difference is that you'd have to go out of your way to placate the person, as he would be a customer.

In a way, it does make sense. In web design and developer communities; there's a saying that if you give an inch, they want a mile. They are not good clients to work with.<p>While it's very appreciated what those guys did, they should've ignored the aggressive support request.<p>I value such free support and very thankful even if it was a ruthless "Go check maxmemory" response to "How does Redis handle bigger data than memory assigned?". Thank them for the response, even if it wasn't the solution. It's appreciated.

I admire the respectful way that he handles communication with the difciult party, and becomes helpful on another level. I'd like to be better at dealing with the world like that.

There's a nice collection of the kind of demands customers come up with: <a href="http://clientsfromhell.net/" rel="nofollow">http://clientsfromhell.net/</a>

This doesn't even apply only to software, generally. My company sell specially tailored storage servers, and we almost gave up on cheaper systems ( &#60; 2000 euros) because they concentrate most of the support problems, questions and rants.<p>In fact, we have one customer buying us cheap systems (1500 euros) by the hundreds. We have very, very little problems with them. We have another customer with a whole bunch of big systems and a couple of small ones for tests, etc. No problem either.<p>So it confirms that it's not so much the cheap system <i>per se</i> than the cheap customer which comes with problems.

I wonder how much of the anecdata being relayed here is a result of selective perception? We don't really remember the cases where a freeloading customer went away at the first "no", or where a well-paying customer received the red carpet service treatment. The high-maintenance cheapskates stick out in mind because they're the exceptions, but perhaps they're not quite so common as they might seem.

Nice article, thanks.<p>My first job out of college was in a support centre, supporting voice recognition software: an early ancestor of Siri if you like! One weekend without our knowledge, the parent company stuck a prior version of the software onto a free bundle cd that came with a PC magazine in the UK... a great marketing move sure, but the amount of calls we got as a result of that free software was incredible. People can get irate when voice recognition software doesn't work as well as they expect (for a variety of reasons, generally either hardware or accent related!), but with this free version, people really lost the run of themselves altogether... some of the calls we took that week were from some very angry people indeed!<p>The writer of this article summed up this confusing paradox quite well by offering a refund... for this free item... which was a gift!

This is really interesting in the context of the whingeing about Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity. One part of me absolutely agrees with the OP, but another part of me thinks that in a specific case like Ubuntu 11.10, Canonical, with their Ubuntu gift, do have a responsibility to their installed base. Is there some line related to project size (or something else) that means users _do_ have a legitimate expectation of adequate support?