Keith Bostic writes:
 > I'm finding that people often only buy support contracts when they have
 > problems, i.e., they only buy support if the software breaks, and so I'm
 > looking for good ideas for motivating support contracts.

Right.  There's two types of "support".  There's support as insurance,
where people buy it to ameliorate risk, and support as a service,
where their risk has "matured" into an actual problem.  Proprietary
software has traditionally priced support as insurance.  For example,
when you buy Windows*, you get support for a fixed period of time
following end-user purchase.  On the other hand, you'll also see
support as a service -- Microsoft doesn't include support for
networks.  You have to pay for that as you need it.

 > This is another problem solved by lagging the "free" version of the
 > software (e.g., where the current version isn't freely available until
 > some months/years after its release), but I really hate to do that if
 > I don't have to.

Right, because you give up some of the benefits of freed software.

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