Toni announced yesterday the launch of the Automattic Support Network. This has of course attracted the attention of many blogs who have discussed the business implications but Peter Chris wonders if WordPress.org support will suffer. Here’s another post on the same issue but Matt replies with an excellent rebuttal.
I very much doubt the support network will have any immediate effect on the level of support offered to non-paying users. The number of non-paying users will always vastly outnumber those who pay for support. What happens if commercial support adversely affects the time spent on non-paying users? Guess what? There’ll be money in the bank to hire somebody else from the community to help out!
This can only be a win-win situation for all involved.
If you want to see what all the fuss is about, then give WordPress MU a spin. It’s come a long way recently, and if you’re looking for more, then visit wpmudev for older releases, some plugins, a theme pack and other stuff.
Yes, we have wonderful people in the support forums. And they’re always there, ready to pitch in. And especially that drmike guy.
Hi,
Nice… The current support at WordPress.org is wonderful and I don’t expect it to suffer. Because anyone with an account can help out. I do that.
This can either end the open source WP, or it will bring back ot the WP community with better versions of the software. Maybe something with more standard features, etc…
before paying a dime to them I’ll move to textile or drupal 😛
What the heck is wrong with this world
Anyone else suspect the last two commenters didn’t actually read the linked article?
Yep. Anyone who complains about the corporate support is a moron.
I can’t see how the free support will falter.. I am an avid poster on the WP forums and have both given and received help. From what I surmise, a great deal of the “top helpers” on the WP forums are not the core WP dev team, so nothing should change…
Test.
Corporate is great as anything corporate means money for living 🙂
Paid support is the perfect way to support the open source development of wordpress. Corporations that use wordpress depend on it to work and require more than the free helping hand offered by the community. They need guaranteed response times to fix problems immediately, which is something they must pay for, so why not automaticc, the ones who actually make the software? Pretty sensible if not great idea.
Most individuals and smaller companies will not pay for support, and so the open source community will remain as thriving as ever.
Hello,
I just show the discussion over here . Open source has changed the way of working we know that we have to pay for support and other advance tech’s but we cannot neglect their hardwork and dedication.