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"Who I'm gonna call if the software has some bugs?"

It's certainly understandable, but it's also worth remembering that for almost any business the idea that they could call, say, Microsoft and get their bug fixed is pretty much a fantasy.

it's also worthwhile mentioning that a lot of 3rd party companies provide support for open source products, it's paid support of course but most of microsoft's support options above the base level are far from free

I have called Microsoft and gotten them to fix bugs and/or back-port fixes to the SP we were on. Anyone with a premier support plan can do the same.

Once we got IBM support to fix a bug on their JVM that was making a production WebSphere core dump.

Interestingly, IBM's WebSphere support team are one of the few commercial outfits I had good results from (a decade ago). Super expensive product, but for the environment at the time it was good choice due to the support people actually having a clue. :)

While not for Microsoft I work for another organization in that size class and this is effectively my entire job. Customer opens a ticket, we engage, resolve, bug fix and deliver. It does cost a pretty penny but the problems go away no matter how vague the circumstance.

On the other side as much as I try to contribute with F/OSS support I'm not going to provide that same level of service as my dedicated job.

> ... the idea that they could call, say, Microsoft and get their bug fixed is pretty much a fantasy.

I don't know why you think this is a fantasy. I could call Microsoft right now and get an engineer within 24 hours to discuss an issue... I think that's our SLA. Might be a shorter time period for initial triage response. But typically we're talking to an engineer within a day. And yes, sometimes these discussions result in bug fixes in upcoming patches.

This is what first-class business support means. Large businesses want to be able to get someone on the phone to fix an issue, and they will pay well for it.

Microsoft (and several others, so they're not alone) has a pretty terrible reputation for their business support. It's something I can personally attest to when trying to engage them a few years ago with a mission critical systems problem for a reasonably large multi-million $ account at the time.

Note also the person you're responding to said "get their bug fixed", which is different from "get an engineer within 24 hours to discuss an issue". Discussing an issue can simply be a tick-off point for an SLA with no real substantial action behind the scenes beyond that.

Of course, you might have very different experiences so far too. :)

Can confirm. One of my first programming jobs was with a company doing a lot of .NET work. They had the gold-tier support, or whatever it's called, but we never managed to get anything useful out of it.

They just say: "You found a bug. Thank you. This product will move to extended support period in 10 months. We cannot promise to fix it by then, if you really need this bug to be fixed for you, you can pay us xxx USD for a hotfix." nuff said bug get never fixed, and will be present in newer product releases. So yes, it's just fantasy for CIOs.

> It's certainly understandable, but it's also worth remembering that for almost any business the idea that they could call, say, Microsoft and get their bug fixed is pretty much a fantasy.

If you believe that, you've never been in an organization which purchased the topmost tiers of a support contract before from one of the big tech companies before. It's actually quite impressive.

Patreon is a perfect example how well known people get support.

Not only good works or project. But sure, most people are known of their projects.

But not every project is so widely used as Vue, many good and really needed projects has not such a huge audience, and those devs did not get $10K per Month.

So Patreon is not the ultimative solution, it works for a small piece of devs.

Let's look at what Evan's offering on his Patreon

Name in file in repository, $10 * 88 = $880

Name top of file in repo, $50 * 5 = $250

Small company logo in file in repo, $100 * 6 = $600

Medium company logo in file in repo, $250 * 0 = $0

Company logo on homepage and Github project: $500 * 11 = $5,500

Company logo on homepage, Github, and in documentation: $2,000 * (limited to one sponsor) = $2,000

So companies are paying for 80% + of the Vue.js income, and the more expensive options with better exposure are in fact more popular than the cheaper ones. To a company, the difference between paying $100 or $500 a month is not worth worrying over, but a direct link from a project page (700k+ impressions per month) is clearly valuable.

Evan should offer more than a single top tier slot, he could have 5 * $4000 instead of 1 * $2000. And why not add a new top-tier for 5-6 figures. If you don't ask, you'll never get it.

> Currently, the Vue's creator is receiving $10k monthly for his works

I think this is commonly used as the best-case for Patreon, i.e. there are very, very few people reaching this, so it's definitely not something to base your future on.

Well its not as if the content is that high quality to excuse such a monthly payments. Vue is a tool that is used and appreciated by many and is already very popular. So definitely not Patreon's fault. Also even if you put your work on Patreon you still have to promote it , it does not matter if you make the best software in the world if none knows about it. Patreon is there to help not to do the work for you. Also 10k is far from top 1, not even top 10 or top 20 more like top 50. You need 20k to be on top 10 and more than 60k to be no 1 and I am willing to bet these numbers will only go up. So 10k is certainly awesome but far from best-case.

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators

OT, but, I wonder when the Trap get knocked off the top spot?

For other references, I collected dozens of FOSS Patreon pages here (two posts): https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1946197&p=13597636...

Are there any developers on Patreon promising support hours or developing specific features in exchange for a given reward? For evanyou, all I see is visibility.

webpack does this on their open collective: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-2-2-the-final-release-76c...