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!