There's a lot of variability, but yeah, that's the right general idea.
Support contracts basically come down to providing higher levels of insurance in exchange for charging (potentially exponentially) higher premiums. You CAN guarantee that you'll fix issues. That might raise the monthly commitment to $10K, or even $100K. There are companies which will pay those premiums because it's worth it to them and they might be paying even more to someone like IBM.
You just have to have a really good support org and make them believe that they're going to get what they need, since that sort of commitment doesn't come lightly. An open source project also needs to consider on whether they're giving up too much autonomy by doing this sort of deal, but the opportunities are out there.
I think the idea of having a rider on the support contract which basically says "you get to vote on the next feature we develop" is a very interesting compromise. Basically no proprietary software vendor offers something like that, you're at their whims, if they decide to spend all their dev time on features that lock you in and then they double your licensing fees, tough luck, you have no recourse. If you went to procurement and told them, hey we'll never do that because if enough of our big customers got together they could vote against that work and we'd have to cancel it, it would blow their minds. It would be the ultimate form of insurance against single vendor lock-in. Who knows how much you could charge for that, because most corporations understand very well how much it costs them many millions of dollars to be locked into some proprietary vendor, they just don't see a good alternative.
So cool to get a response from the founder of Tarsnap btw!
Support contracts basically come down to providing higher levels of insurance in exchange for charging (potentially exponentially) higher premiums. You CAN guarantee that you'll fix issues. That might raise the monthly commitment to $10K, or even $100K. There are companies which will pay those premiums because it's worth it to them and they might be paying even more to someone like IBM.
You just have to have a really good support org and make them believe that they're going to get what they need, since that sort of commitment doesn't come lightly. An open source project also needs to consider on whether they're giving up too much autonomy by doing this sort of deal, but the opportunities are out there.
I think the idea of having a rider on the support contract which basically says "you get to vote on the next feature we develop" is a very interesting compromise. Basically no proprietary software vendor offers something like that, you're at their whims, if they decide to spend all their dev time on features that lock you in and then they double your licensing fees, tough luck, you have no recourse. If you went to procurement and told them, hey we'll never do that because if enough of our big customers got together they could vote against that work and we'd have to cancel it, it would blow their minds. It would be the ultimate form of insurance against single vendor lock-in. Who knows how much you could charge for that, because most corporations understand very well how much it costs them many millions of dollars to be locked into some proprietary vendor, they just don't see a good alternative.
So cool to get a response from the founder of Tarsnap btw!