Professional help with installation and upgrade

Maybe a good idea how to keep users happy, get experience with various platforms and installation issues and earn some money that will be invested back in the project

A good friend of mine is a freelance web designer and he's using activeCollab to manage his projects since alpha version. Few days ago he contacted me on ICQ and asked for help he was stuck with upgrade script. I already had his FTP parameters and phpMyAdmin access. It took me less than 15 minutes to make everything up and running.

The worst case would be that he searched on his own for the solution, wasted a lot of time trying to make it work, spend hours waiting on the forum and be involved in something that I call telepathic debugging (developer is trying to help by making questions and guessing what could go wrong, asking user to make a proper changes and report back the results, repeat). That is the worst kind of debugging, but when you are supporting software without real access to the problematic code or platform that's usually the only way to go. Stress for the user and for the developer at the same time.

In most cases I just can't help that way and it just wastes users and mine time so I came up with this simple idea. For a small fee (I could not do this for free) I'll fix any installation or upgrade problems on your server. Only data I need is FTP access.

Benefits of this approach:

  1. Installation and upgrade is handled by person who knows system very well. You don't need to worry about anything.
  2. You'll get complete backup of old system and I'll make sure that everything runs as expected after upgrade is done.
  3. When I have the code in front of myself it usually takes me short amount of time to find out where the problem is and how to solve it. Telepathic debugging takes a lot of time and usually results only in frustration.
  4. I get to know many platforms and installations and I could use that experience in providing better installers and upgrade scripts in the future. Some strange bugs (like recent blank page problems) can also be nailed this way.
  5. Money will be invested back in the project - hiring experts to help, advertising project, competitions when we get plugin support etc.

Fee I had in mind is $20 per intervention (that is my hourly rate). If your host meets system requirements and I still fail to provide a solution you get your money back.

How does this sound to you? This is just an idea and I'd like to hear what you have to say about it.

Btw, If you fear that I might make installation or upgrade process a bit harder just to get more interventions gigs - don't. I would never do something like that.

Posted on: 2006-10-12 3:45

Comments

avatar joyel 2006-10-12 4:19 #1
I think it’s good, I think that would be a good way to bring in more money for activecollab, Iw ill try to find people to donate too.
avatar rgk 2006-10-12 6:01 #2
I think its a good idea only if its related to install problems… if i am correct tho the whole project is ment to be free and if you start charging it sort of defeats the purpose
avatar Hun Kim 2006-10-12 9:43 #3
We’d definitely be willing to pay for consultation. :]
avatar Gabriel Radic 2006-10-12 11:40 #4
Ilija, this sounds like a great idea.

Your rates are very competitive.

Thanks.
avatar mano 2006-10-12 1:24 #5
were do I go to sign up sounds great and in the process money is going back into the project let me know what you need from me
avatar Mike Vogt 2006-10-12 3:23 #6
Sounds fair. I hope you dont get swamped and the $$ would shift priority away from development. However with opening the development process to a team I think the impact will get balanced out. How ‘bout opening paid support to a team too? I’m thinking posting a list of support for fee contacts.
avatar Ilija Studen 2006-10-12 3:30 #7
@rgk: You misunderstood the whole point of free software. In case of software released under the terms of GPL or similar license free stands for freedom, not free of charge. License guaranty that you will have four freedoms will not be violated:

* Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
* Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
* Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

That is what license says. activeCollab as a software product will always be free, but that does not mean that related services such as support, custom plugin or theme development, professional maintenance and performance tuning etc should be free. That services are time consuming and provide additional value, but they are not essentially part of the product. They are… additional.

Just one small, real world example: people get payed to develop custom plugins for osCommerce, install it and customize it to fit specific customers needs etc. osCommerce is free, but that services are not.

Bottom line: activeCollab will always be free, but additional services provided by me or any other person or organization can be charged.
avatar Cullen Wilson 2006-10-12 4:19 #8
Great idea. I think not only will you get a nice amount of investment back into the project from this, but you’ll get more users for AC as well. Half the battle is actually getting people to use OpenSource, which can be hard because many people have the mindset that open source is complicated and hard to setup.

I wish you would have been offering this a week ago when I was having troubles with .7 RC1. I eventually got it working, but it look me 2.5 hours which cost me much more then $20 in the long run.
avatar Chris 2006-10-12 8:25 #9
I will happily donate 20-40 dollars if you could help me take my semi-working version of 0.6 and upgrade it to a semi-working version of 0.7 RC2

My users are screaming for uploads to work.
avatar Austin 2006-10-12 8:40 #10
This sounds like a great idea, but I would double your rate.
avatar Dan 2006-10-12 10:46 #11
I also love the idea, but I’m with Austin, up the price. This is quality work and your time is valuable.
avatar James Taylor 2006-10-13 7:46 #12
I am wanting to host activecollab on my fileserver (Ubuntu 5.10), and I can upgrade the system to PHP5, etc…

If I have problems, I wonder if you would charge the $40USD per hour or have another fee structure to provide phone support since I don’t have FTP service configured on my in-house file server.

Thanks,

James
avatar Ilija Studen 2006-10-13 9:14 #13
Hi James,

Idea of telephone support for installation and upgrade brings us back to telepathic debugging. I need to point out that this is not about money but about solving problems quickly and learning more about different platforms where people deploy activeCollab. Money is there just to cover costs of time I invest in intervention, not the sole purpose of the whole idea.

Sorry, I would not like to get involved in that kind of support. Direct access to the code and platform that makes problems is a requirement.

You can still use forums for asking questions.
avatar Marshall Kirkpatrick 2006-10-13 9:26 #14
Sounds great, I imagine you’ll want to hire other people someday soon to help with this and related work. You should charge more, though. Nice to see so many supportive comments already.
avatar Nagita 2006-10-13 10:33 #15
Considering BC prices are up to $150/month, from my perspective your price is a little low.
avatar Paolo 2006-10-14 9:06 #16
Yeah.. Charge more! You deserve to make a living. In the UK I’d pay a decent PHP developer £25 an hour, ($45)..
avatar Ian 2006-10-16 1:33 #17
I am so impressed with AC – exactly what I was looking for, and I much prefer being in control of the system compared to be being at the mercy of Basecamp.

But I’m worried that at $20 per intervention you’ll spend your life helping people install it, and development of the project will slow down.

If you’ve got the skills to design AC then I would say that you are worth a lot more than $20 an hour!
avatar Luis 2006-10-17 4:29 #18
I agree with most here, Elija.

I would say you have two choices: either value yourself according to your skills (considerably more than $20/hour) or get help from someone junior so that you can continue improving the application.

If I where you I would start considering hiring people and starting a company. I don’t know how it is in your country, but in other places you can even resource to government grants and the like. By the way, I installed the application on my tablet PC in no time, and I’m already playing with the style sheets to make it more pen friendly.

By the way, your way of coding is very interesting… you have a lot of talent. Keep it up!!!
avatar marcoss 2006-10-20 5:21 #19
That price is really low, you should charge at least $50 per “support session”, as someone said above, your time is gold and if people don´t pay what you are worth, then they still have the forums ;)
avatar jive (Jonas Flint) 2006-10-22 5:42 #20
Hmmm. Elija is probably from a different country other than the US. In that case he would be off-shoring. I think his price is above average to php programmers over seas. (Sorry folks, harsh reality.)

I think he’s setting it about right.
avatar Boolean 2006-10-22 11:51 #21
Ilija,
Good idea.
Make it 50$. So you can balance your time between development and support.
avatar Luis 2006-10-23 3:38 #22
jive:

Yes, Ilija does’t live in the US, he lives in Serbia… so what?

This is not about the reality of overseas rates, it is about having the only open source alternative to basecamp and knowing it better than nobody else when dealing with installation issues.

Welcome to globalization.

Cheers.

avatar conflict of interest 2006-10-29 6:15 #23
Sounds like the epitome of “conflict of interest” to me. So if we understand correctly, if you allow lots of bugs to remain in the system, this will cause more people to pay you a fee to get the bugs out. But if you release the system upgrades with very few bugs, you will inevitably make far less money because people won’t pay you a fee on numerous occassions (and for numerous hours) to get the bugs out. I look at the above comments and I see that each and everyone (except one) who posted a comment says its a good idea, some even say that you should charge more money. If you listen to the majority here, you’ll go ahead with your fee-based idea. But if you stop to consider those who are financially disadvantaged who are not yelling out ‘charge more’ and who are not here, maybe you’ll reconsider your idea.

Your small-fee idea is like a scientist creating a free-of-charge cure for cancer… but it has so many fatal side effects… and the scientist decides he’ll do everyone a favor by charging them a small fee for the cures for all those side effects. Would that be ethical? According to your fee-based support plan, yes.

Do you think he’d be remembered as the altrustic founder of the cure for cancer? Or the scientist who found a way to make a buck off of other people’s suffering? And if you go ahead with this fee-based support idea, do you think you’ll be remembered as a developer of an altruistic opensource system? Or the developer who found a way to make a buck off of other people’s chronic-bug suffering?

In comment #2 someone said “if you start charging it sort of defeats the purpose” and that person is exactly right (regardless of the long-winded string of excuses and unethical rationalizations found in comment #7. Never forget that 300 years of rationalizations enabled people in the USA to say that slavery was a good idea, and the women not being allowed to vote was also very good). I think the best thing that you could do, is try to create a directory of “third-party” people and techs willing to offer support, and then invest your time on perfecting activecollab, a very awesome project, rather than nickel and diming people along the way.

I only found this website because I have been looking non-stop for opensource alternatives to social networking sites like myspace, and so far all I have found is this, elgg and Mugshot. If anyone else knows of other opensource social networking systems please send me an email to this email address “resources atsymbol aworldofpeace.org.” Or go to www.aworldofpeace.org, click on ‘discussion forums’ and place the information under ‘General Discussion.’ No offense intended by any of my words here. I think this activecollab idea is great, but the fee-based support coming from the developer is not a good idea at at all.
avatar Ilija Studen 2006-10-29 12:10 #24
Thank you all for the support!

@conflict of interest

About your concerns on conflict of interest please check the last line of this post:
If you fear that I might make installation or upgrade process a bit harder just to get more interventions gigs don’t. I would never do something like that.

Why do you think that making money in open source is a bad idea? It is not! To be more precise, good open source project that provides a solid income for developers or companies that base their business around that project will be successful because more attention and resources will be committed to the project.

do you think you’ll be remembered as a developer of an altruistic opensource system?

Sorry, not on my priority list ;) But this is. Please take a good look at this goal: Sustainable business model so we can guaranty our users that we’ll be here in two or five years from now. How many open source projects that base their existence on altruism can do this?
avatar Blaze 2006-10-30 1:11 #25
Your small-fee idea is like a scientist creating a free-of-charge cure for cancer… but it has so many fatal side effects… and the scientist decides he’ll do everyone a favor by charging them a small fee for the cures for all those side effects. Would that be ethical? According to your fee-based support plan, yes.


What a load of s**t. He made the software. He can do what he likes. He could start charging for it tomorrow and change the license. So be grateful for the fact that it is provided for free & he is able to support his efforts of helping users individually with a small monetary contribution. I think that is completely fair.
avatar Mladen Mihajlovic 2006-10-31 2:27 #26
Anyway, there are lots of open source applications which have commercial support plans behind them. Look at MySql for example.

Only concert I have is that you will be swamped with support and not have enough time for development ;)
avatar Mladen Mihajlovic 2006-10-31 2:31 #27
Hehe, that should have been concern.
avatar david lake 2006-10-31 9:21 #28
how can i take advantage of the install service. i am definately willing to donate/pay $20 to have this installed on my server. please advise.

thanks
avatar Ilija Studen 2006-10-31 10:28 #29
@David: I’ve replied to you in topic you posted in forums.

Let me point out that this was posted just to see how community will react on this idea and that I’m not yet offering this kind of services officially. Set of support oriented services, including this type of intervention will be introduced in next few months. Goal is to provide high quality service to the users while making some money out of it. That was the plan since day one (see #6 in post Why is activeCollab free?).
avatar Eirik 2006-11-01 12:07 #30
My only concern is what many others have said; that’ll take time away from development. Consider getting “juniors” to do the support work, they can still ask you to do it if they don’t get it to work. I would guess most installations and installation issues are pretty easy to do/fix.

The “conflict of interest” post is just stupid, by doing what you’ve already done with aC, you’ve shown us that you are a person to trust.
avatar Ilija Studen 2006-11-01 12:24 #31
I still invest more time in support than in development ;) Check out the forums, blog posts and comments, site reconstruction and all of other things that are activeCollab related, but does not contribute to the activeCollab codebase. Project is the whole experience, not just the code. With commercial support I’ll still do the same thing, but I’ll be payed for part of the invested time and hopefully bring more people on board (reliability costs).

To bring much better experience we need more energy invested in the project and that requires:

1. Strong community that will be involved in all parts of product development.
2. Commercial services for people and companies that need more that community supported product.

So, give me some time ;) There is no reason to rush anything.
avatar keyrocks 2006-11-23 6:19 #32
Ilija – don’t bother giving the whiners the time of day. If they don’t like the idea of you charging for support time… or they they think a guy in Serbia is earning too much at $20.00 U.S. per hour, chances are these guys are living and working in the U.S.A. ... where a lot of large distributor companies and software developers farm their product manufacturing and development work out to offshore countries to get cheap labor… and fill their own pockets with more money. You don’t need to justify your rates at all. If someone needs to get help and wants to save money and time… they will pay the rate no matter what it is.

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