4.3. Service Levels

Everything on this site is free. We ask you to respect that and the collective effort that goes into making this material available. If you feel moved to help others as we help you, that would be lovely - we want this to spread as far and wide as possible.

What that means is either individuals are giving of their time freely or they’re being paid by our sponsors to help you for free. People who work for our sponsors have a “day job” and whilst they have a percentage of their time allocated to the Foundation, their “day job” takes priority because that’s what pays the bills.

The service level we’re committing to is “best efforts”. If you need more we’re happy to engage with you on a commercial basis. We can do proper Enterprise-level support contracts if people are interested.

Generally it all works out fine because you don’t need our active attention to use this work. Sometimes people get grumpy because we’re all supportive and they slip into thinking they’re a customer and we’re a supplier who have committed to a certain level of service. This is a misunderstanding of the situation. Please don’t take us for granted just because we’re nicer and more generous than most.

Yes, this has happened - but we’re ok with it, we’re just learning how to set expectations better. Also we’re not naming names, but we’d rather be this side of the fence than taking advantage of our “customers” without actually offering any way for them to make an income.

4.3.1. Complaints

Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes you might get frustrated. Please bring that up directly with Simon or Chandima. Raising things in a public forum makes everything so much more complicated, especially if there’s misunderstandings. And generally most things are misunderstandings, so a quiet word is better than a public drama-filled rant.

4.3.2. Appreciation

We’ve worked really hard on this, not only developing it but then documenting it in a way that others can build on. On a human level it’s always nice to hear from people how they’ve used our work. You can send us fan mail and feedback here.