alt Hacker NewsI’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
Replies
> it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).
> There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore.
Somebody paying for your product is very strong signal. You know that such a person represents real world use cases for your product, and that their issues and feature requests are based on real world problems. Otherwise the chances are low that they would be paying for the software.
So helping them with what they want could mean that you've just tipped the scale enough for hundreds or thousands of people to become new customers.
And of course you should give them their money back to get rid of them if they're any kind of headache. Or tell them that their requested feature will be in the next versions, which is a new purchase.