[hobbit] Informal survey about commercial support for Hobbit

[Kauffman, Tom]

You mean the support could be better than this??? Good trick! :-)

And an observation my father made a long time ago -- "When you start
making money from your hobby, it becomes work, and work isn't as much
fun."

Now that I've got that out of the way -- my management has come around
several times, wondering if there was any way of providing you with
compensation for all the work you're doing, and this could be it (but
keep your amazon wish list up to date, please!).

Unlike others on this list, we don't run any 'mission-critical' systems
(at least not by IBM's definition) and while we have several
'enterprise-critical' systems, hobbit as-is does very nicely for us.

We would most likely be interested an a reasonably priced annual fee for
the opportunity to get either custom modifications to hobbit (based on
the past couple of change requests, this looks more like "getting our
stuff moved to the top of the priority list") or consultation and
assistance in implementing custom tests. This would be direct email
support, 24 hour response, and should probably be limited to one such
mod/test per calendar quarter. As for 'reasonable price' -- somewhere in
the $2500 to $3000 US range.

There is, of course, no guarantee we'd sign up for this if you offer it.
There's also the very real possibility we'd sign up for it and not
really make use of it (we can be strange that way at times :-)

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] 
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 11:19 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] Informal survey about commercial support for Hobbit

I've had a couple of enquiries about providing commercial support
for Hobbit. In essence they need a guaranteed response to e-mail
support queries, as a supplement to the mailing list where mails
do get answered, but not always within a day or two.

Making money off Hobbit never was my intention, but being paid for
doing what is really a hobby for me does seem attractive.

So this is just an informal survey: 

* Would you be interested in paying for Hobbit support? 
* What kind of support do you need? E-mail for solving problems,
  custom feature developments, or ... ?
* What response-time requirements do you have? Since I'm in Europe
  and a lot of the Hobbit users are in the US or Australia, I have
  a problem with same-day response guarantees.
* How much are you willing to spend on it ?

Feel free to respond here on the list, or to me directly.

Just to avoid raising any panic, let me emphasize that this will NOT
in any way stop or detract from the support I offer here on the 
mailing list. I think the mailing list will always be the primary 
support channel, and a place for discussing Hobbit developments,
beta versions and all the other related issues. It's just that some
companies feel more comfortable using software when there is a
"normal" support contract.


Regards,
Henrik


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