Being too helpful
Jun. 3rd, 2016 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcWe at the Open Microscopy Environment provide open-source software on GitHub under ome and openmicroscopy with extensive developer documention for both Bio-Formats and OMERO. We distribute our software for free and support it mostly through mailing lists and forums.
Our users often praise our support, suggesting that it exceeds what is typical of commercial paid support. They also, despite often having software development skills themselves, rarely contribute fixes or features: they are much better at reporting issues than addressing them.
This week I was intrigued to hear the suggestion that we don't get anywhere near as many external contributions as one might expect of free open-source projects with a large userbase because we are too good at promptly answering users' questions and actually delivering code changes to address them. It's a generalization of the idea, wait for a day before investigating support requests in case people just figure out the issue themselves.
I don't believe that we have any intention to respond to this hypothesis by becoming less helpful but it is an interesting
Our users often praise our support, suggesting that it exceeds what is typical of commercial paid support. They also, despite often having software development skills themselves, rarely contribute fixes or features: they are much better at reporting issues than addressing them.
This week I was intrigued to hear the suggestion that we don't get anywhere near as many external contributions as one might expect of free open-source projects with a large userbase because we are too good at promptly answering users' questions and actually delivering code changes to address them. It's a generalization of the idea, wait for a day before investigating support requests in case people just figure out the issue themselves.
I don't believe that we have any intention to respond to this hypothesis by becoming less helpful but it is an interesting
problemthat I had not considered before.
