Since most of our software is available under a dual-license scheme, it’s pretty easy to get up and running, do initial integrations or tests, and generally start coming to grips with it technically. When used in open source projects, we often don’t even know that people are using our stuff, which is fine: the more, the merrier. When used commercially, however, in most cases organizations are interested either in proprietary licensing or commercial support plans, or both. That’s fine, too, since the more customers, as opposed to users, means the better the software will become in the short and medium term.
The tricky calculation for us is how much free support to offer to users (that is, non-customers) and to potential customers; free support is from our perspective, obviously, a cost, though it can be a part of an extended sales process. But sometimes we simply don’t have the available cycles to devote as much time to free support as some (including us!) would prefer.
In those cases we recommend our commercial support plans, since those customers get high priority attention with respect to support, training, bug fixes, etc.
As the man says, if you need this, you need it badly—and it’s worth paying for.
