What I'm seeing here is a customer support problem. And IMHO, PowerDNS isn't taking the correct steps to solve it.
It's funny, because the answer is right in the article. If your customer:
* is large and/or interesting
* has a legal/security/marketing/ team that's worried about sharing information publicly
* has an IT dept that doesn't know the whole company is depending on a single open source product
* feels they have to use gmail accounts and made-up names to talk to you
Then maybe a public forum really isn't the place to expect your customers to ask for help.
I would suggest creating a partnership program for businesses like Cloudflare - swap tech support for publicity (which will then help drive adoption)
I think they should have a VIP program akin like WordPress. I think every serious Open Source project should have some kind of separated channel for Corporate/BigInstalls.
I would not entirely place the blame on PowerDNS here, it also points out that how our Corporate citizens can do better for the eco-system by being active partners with the Open Source projects they rely on, instead of hide and snipe mailing-listers.
Another reason why employees at big corporations are loath to contact
open source projects is that they assume they won’t get help, and need
to pay for support. And, while it is true that someone needs to pay the
bills here, we realise that for many users, a support agreement is just
not going to happen. Corporate IT might not even know the whole company
is relying on an open source project. Questions might be asked. For such
organisations, we are fine with providing free help on the public mailing
lists. But to give proper weight and context to your issue, it helps if
we know who you are.
I think corporate owners are in the best position to offer money for services. They are usually looking specifically for some sort of support contract they can pay for! (If Corporate IT doesn't know, that company has bigger problems anyway.) Something like a VIP program would be a great way to get these types of users in the door. Feed all that money back into your open source project - if you're big enough you probably have project support costs anyway (hosting, etc).
I agree with your second point as well, and I think it reinforces my point, because you can take those internal people that you are dedicating to the task and make them the active partners to the open source project.
Giving away a good portion of your infrastructure in a public forum and asking for configuration help, IS just asking for trouble.
The "large and interesting" deployment line was stated and reiterated several times as being "important" to the level of help that you'll receive from them. I fail to understand HOW this will garner more users to your service.
What I was referring to was using this service if you're NOT Google, Amazon or Facebook.
Nothing discourages me more from using a service if you differentiate the type of customer support you provide to a client based on their size or whether they have an "interesting" setup.
In the grand scheme of things, Google, Amazon and Facebook are less normal, so if you're tailoring your support model around those types of clients, then it's not for me...
My company has someone at Youtube they can call if they ever need help. Same with Facebook. Does that discourage you from using those services? Big companies give their big clients a support channel that doesn't exist for everyone. That's normal.
I guess the thing is, you don't want to make that too widely known. It's more of an optics thing.
It's funny, because the answer is right in the article. If your customer:
* is large and/or interesting * has a legal/security/marketing/ team that's worried about sharing information publicly * has an IT dept that doesn't know the whole company is depending on a single open source product * feels they have to use gmail accounts and made-up names to talk to you
Then maybe a public forum really isn't the place to expect your customers to ask for help.
I would suggest creating a partnership program for businesses like Cloudflare - swap tech support for publicity (which will then help drive adoption)