Poll re­sults: what should we (not) do?

A few weeks back we've been send­ing around this poll via our newslet­ter sub­scriber base. We got a lot of an­swers so I will not go into every sin­gle one of them (and we can't send in­di­vid­ual replies, BTW, be­cause the sur­vey was anony­mous). How­ev­er, here is a dis­til­la­tion of the re­sults, and our com­ments / ques­tions to each.

Com­mu­ni­ty

• Ne­glect­ing our users: we got at least some re­marks about ne­glect­ing our non-com­mer­cial user base. We are very sor­ry if that seems to be the case, and we ac­tu­al­ly feel quite the con­trary. We chose an open source mod­el and have nev­er re­gret­ted it to date. Our com­mu­ni­ty users are most def­i­nite­ly every bit as im­por­tant to us as our cus­tomers, be­cause we would not get cus­tomers if it weren't for our com­mu­ni­ty (thanks for that, BTW!). How­ev­er, fact of life is that we only have 24 hours every day and some­times we need to make mon­ey be­sides the stuff we can of­fer for free. So in a way, we've been the vic­tim of our own suc­cess be­cause we had to serve a lot of new cus­tomers late­ly (es­pe­cial­ly since we've re­de­fined our busi­ness mod­el and the pric­ing that goes with it). Our sin­cer­est apolo­gies if this caused us to ap­pear a bit neg­li­gent.
• More open tools: this in­cludes things like our source code repos­i­to­ry, fo­rums, is­sue track­er and doc­u­men­ta­tion / ex­am­ples. Grant­ed, we could do a bet­ter job on those, but first and fore­most we want to use the tools that sup­port our busi­ness mod­el (sup­port that is). So that's what has been guid­ing our choic­es so far. We haven't found a bet­ter 'stack' yet that serves that pur­pose and is worth the over­head of switch­ing... We're al­ways on the look­out for op­por­tu­ni­ties though.

Busi­ness mod­el: some re­spon­dents sug­gest­ed we look into a new busi­ness mod­el like JBoss, for in­stance. We don't re­al­ly un­der­stand why, be­cause what we are do­ing is about the same thing as what Red Hat is do­ing? We're cu­ri­ous to learn though, if any­body wants to clar­i­fy...

In­te­gra­tions: a lot of peo­ple re­quest­ed more built-in in­te­gra­tion with third-par­ty plat­forms. We're cer­tain­ly do­ing that: we've re­cent­ly added Tom­cat and are work­ing on more things to come... Thanks for that!

Doc­u­men­ta­tion: We al­ways need more doc­u­men­ta­tion. Some­body also sug­gest­ed that we re­struc­ture our ex­ist­ing docs and of­fered to help. If you are that per­son, please email us (plen­ty of con­tact ad­dress­es on our web­site). Thanks!

Per­for­mance: We should do more bench­mark­ing and pub­lish / com­pare the re­sults. That is cer­tain­ly true, but we found that it de­pends so much on your con­fig­u­ra­tion (not ours) that it is hard to come to a gen­er­al con­clu­sion. It just de­pends...

Again, we were not able to con­tact in­di­vid­ual re­spon­dents so our in­ter­pre­ta­tion and con­clu­sion could be wrong. If that is the case, and you feel mis­un­der­stood (or just want to help) then please get in touch via our web­site.

Thanks!