support network

[bruce@va.debian.org]

Jay:
> In addition to quality-of-service issues, we need to have policy on what
> happens, for example, if a customer develops a good working relationship
> with a consultant and they decide to sign a support contract outside of
> this company.

I thought about this for a while and decided that I do not have a problem
with it as long as the consultant makes it clear to the customer that this
is separate from the business I will be operating.

At least at the start, the pay is not going to be tremendous and some of
the compensation is going to be that you are helping Debian by creating the
GPL-ed support database (and by doing whatever else you do for Debian in
the course of consulting). For me to get greedy about consultants cutting
their own deals would not be good, because getting their own good customers
will be part of their compensation, too. In fact, there is enough of a
margin included that they can offer the customer a discount for dealing
directly with them and cut me out of the deal.

What I am thinking about so far is $45 per incident and $30 of that goes
to the consultant _upon_collection_. I get immediate credit-card processing
so collection should not be slow. The rest goes to the operation of the
network, construction of the support database, charge-backs (I hope they
are not bad), the percentage charged for credit clearance, etc. This is
going to be kind of low for some of you but it's what I can offer while
this whole thing is being bootstrapped.

I'm hoping that enough people are involved that we have expertise to cover
the entire Official CD, and that people won't pull down service tickets for
problems they can't answer.

	Thanks

	Bruce