A customer, by definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer) exchanges something of value (money) for a product or service.
That does not mean that a freemium model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium) is not a valid business model. However, if there is no exchange of value, the person consuming the free version of the product or service, is not (yet) a customer.
If MediaWiki is the thing we give away for free, what do we charge money for? Are our customers successfully subsidizing our free (as in beer) software?
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 7:33 PM John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
2- Everything is open-source and as non-profit, there's always resource constraint. If it's really important to you, feel free to make a patch
and
the team would be always more than happy to review.
Wikipedia is the core product, and the users are the primary customers. When a group of core customers request a change, then the service provider should respond. Whether the service provider is a non-profit doesn't really matter, the business model is not part of the functional requirement. The service provider should simply make sure the processes function properly.
If the service provider has resource constraints, then it must scale the services until it gets a reasonable balance, but that does not seem to be the case here. It is more like there are no process or the process is defunc.
The strange thing is; for many projects the primary customers aren't even part of a stakeholder group, the devs in the groups defines themselves as the "product user group". That tend to skew development from bugs to features. Perhaps that is what happen in general here, too much techies that believe they are the primary customers.
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