As a developer, you know enough about your code to do anything you want. Others are having a much harder time getting your software to run. Time for some support. But how to approach this? This article will look into that.
You work on a nice piece of open source software, alone or in a team. You can handle all you want by yourself. You plan everything, determine which features should be included, and of course you support your users. No problem. Until the moment comes that your software actually becomes popular. Popular enough to bring in a lot of new users. They all have questions regarding your software. Instead of developing all the new features that you thought of, you find yourself more and more answering questions of users. From those questions, you get even more ideas, for instance on how to improve user interaction. But you have no time to work on those ideas anymore. Clearly, you have a need to offer more structured support.
I think it is safe to say that no product can become successful without a good customer support system. This goes for commercial products as well as for open source products. If you have a good product, but you don't offer support, you'll soon find yourself with a declining userbase. People will opt for a lesser product if the support on it is better. They'd rather put up with the lower quality, as long as they get a good response to their questions concerning the product. Because a product they can use is better than a product they can not use.
In open source, this is maybe even more important. Because in most cases you lose the additional step of paying for the product, it is much easier for someone to make a switch if a product, or its support, is not satisfactory. So, if you want your software to become popular and widely used, it is wise to spend some time thinking about supporting your users, at least once your user base is growing.
