[rt-users] IMPORTANT: Change to RT support policy

[Jesse Vincent]

Over the past few years, RT has become the clear leader in open-source
ticketing systems. In the summer of 2000, I quit my full-time job to
concentrate on RT and other projects. I'm quite pleased with the state
and direction of the product.

The amount of time I spend helping out folks running RT has increased
from about an hour every other week in 1996 to more than 40 hours per
week today. In a good week, I might get paid for 30 minutes of that
time.

The most frequent explanation I hear from sites about why they aren't
interested in purchasing support is that "the free support is too good."

This puts me into a bit of a bind.

RT is my full-time job and only source of income. At this point, I spend
far more time answering questions about RT than I do actually working on
the product.

As of today, I am no longer able to provide free support for RT. This
means that I will no longer answer personal mail requesting help with
RT, nor will I be able to answer requests for assistance on the public
rt-users mailinglist.

As always, I encourage you to report bugs to rt-users or to
rt-2.0-bugs at fsck.com, but regret that unless they are reported by a
paying customer, I can only fix them as time, finances or interest
allow.

Best Practical Solutions LLC is the company I've set up to sell support
and development for RT and related projects. If you need help with RT,
I'd encourage you to purchase either a single support incident or a
Support Contract from BestPractical.com. If you have any questions about
commercial support, please address them to sales at bestpractical.com. That
still gets to me, but it gets logged by the right RT instance. ;)

The rt-users list will continue to serve as a general resource to
the community. There are a number of very smart, very experienced RT
users on the list who do a fantastic job of answering a wide variety
of questions with remarkable speed and accuracy. If commercial support
isn't an option for you, it's likely that somebody on rt-users should be
able to help you out.


        Thank You, 

	Jesse Vincent

-- 
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/    Trouble ticketing. Free.