On 21 Mar 2007, at 15:17, Björnke von Gierke wrote:
Ok, if they don't have enough money to pay me now, then they can
owe it to me, and, *if* and when they do make lots of money they
can pay me then. How does that sound? I would charge £15.00 per
hour, that's a lot cheaper than they are advertising their
consultancy services for! Presumably the people at RunRev are
getting paid a good salary or if not are being rewarded in terms
of shares and/or the promise of money if and when they hit the big
time.
I do agree with Dave's general direction (if not with the way he
expresses it).
We all pay RunRev money so they can produce a good product. It's
not our duty nor our responsibility to do any testing on their
behave. Actually it should be the other way around. If there's a
bug we should get an easy accessible list of workarounds, until the
bug is fixed with the next release of Rev, of course in addition to
every Feature anyone requested.
On the other hand there's the open source approach. Users don't pay
to use software, they commit time and effort to make the product
better, so their own stuff based on the open source software gets
better. Every user always puts equal effort into the open source
foundation as into his own project. Bugs are fixed within minutes
of their discovery, and every feature a user needs is implemented
by that same user within even less time.
But alas this world is not perfection wonderland, bugs are hard to
find and to track down, feature additions make a product
complicated, and aggravate people who are used to the old way.
RunRev is walking a middle ground here. In my opinion, it's crucial
for their future to not adopt the worst of both the commercial way
and the open source way, but to work out a methodic to get the
strengths of both worlds. That is not easy for such a small
company, but if they have a clear vision about how they want to
interact with their customers, then it is possible.
Specifically, Bugzilla is a workaround for having no clue where
bugs come from. Customers that find a bug are asked to make an
effort to increase the product they paid for, and these bugs could
linger for years due to time constrains. Unfortunately for everyone
involved, that's how RunRev's software currently works.
The existing system does not rock in any way. It's a patch on
reality forced upon everyone by legacy, money and priority
management, not more and not less.
Actually we started the discussion at cross purposes I think. I was
talking about first level soak (stress) testing in the development
process before the code is checked in, before it goes to QA and *way*
before it gets to beta stage.
In hopes for a constructive discussion
Sounds good to me!
Björnke von Gierke
There are more ways of paying for something than money! Even if you
only got a free T-Shirt or free hard copy of the manual it would be
something. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Having said that, I really wouldn't mind doing the beta testing for
free on a volunteer basis, but not as an expectation!
I signed up for the Beta Program a while back, but I heard nothing
for months, then a short while ago I was contacted with the details,
unfortunately I don't have enough time now. When I signed up I could
have put aside a couple of hours a day.
All the Best
Dave
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