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posted by on Monday December 19 2016, @09:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the how-to-run-a-business dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After leaving a negative review and opening a support ticket about HRDSOFTWARE, a customer was told that he needed to download and install the latest version; then they would be able to provide support. He followed their directions, and once the download was installed, the program started, displayed the splash screen, and then completely shut down. After calling the support line to ask them to explain what they were doing, they informed him that he was blacklisted and the file they directed him to download blocked the software on the computer from running. PDF of ticket.

This thread on a ham radio enthusiast forum details the customer's complaint along with the expected peanut gallery postings. Discussion spread to other fora, accusations flew of favoritism and deleted posts. One co-owner pops in to say he's fixed the user's problem. Then something interesting happens on page 37. The other co-owner of HRDSoftware steps in and apologizes, reinstates the user's software, and spends the next 25 (and counting) pages engaging with the community and talking about how he can improve things going forward.

This story started out being about how users get punished for giving negative feedback, but now it is also about how to be a responsible business owner and respond to your userbase.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @10:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @10:36AM (#443054)

    Not a problem because you can always fix it yourself, then submit your patches to upstream, where your contribution will be rejected because the bugs you fixed weren't on the maintainer's to do list, but the maintainer will still try to pressure you to work on something else which is on the to do list, and then you tell the upstream maintainer to go to hell.

    And people wonder why free software doesn't work out of the box half the time.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:40AM (#443073)

    I've been involved with (although not a major code contributor) in the free software movement since the 90s. While I have been told 'that concept isn't planned for this software' I have never had a bug report go unfixed (although a few only made it into a 'new' release that either couldn't or would not be run on my system for other reasons.) And in many cases even feature requests will get implemented, unless they are non-trivial to implement. (meaning on the order of months of work or rearchitecting. Things that would take a few hours/days/week often got done the next time they were working on that part of the code.

    Having said that, there are a number of projects out there that could rather be called 'clique-ish source' or 'pseudo-open source'. Those projects mostly live under the guise of being open without communal development, then spin back into closed source projects later on while claiming it is all because of a lack of community engagement. (SWGemu Core2/3 were/are examples of this. Hint: the entire backend codebase is proprietary, while incomplete frontend code was LGPL'd only with illegal licensing restrictions, and now AGPL'd. Still no working JTL support 10 years later either!)

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:28PM (#443088)

      Clique-ish pseudo-open source is the cathedral model, and it's the way RMS intended. GNU projects belong to the FSF, and RMS claims the right to appropriate any changes you make, but only if he wants them. It's droit du seigneur applied to software. If RMS wants to fuck your wife then you can't stop him, but if your wife is ugly then you can fuck off.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:33PM (#443190)

        If you don't like the way the FSF handles a project, you can always fork it. If you do it right, your fork may even end up being the official GNU project; see egcs.