I’ve been answering questions in the Exim users’ mailing list for longer than I care to remember – I’m on the moderation team, too. We get our fair share of questions which beg one or more of the answers ‘Read the Docs’, ‘Search the archives’ or ‘Ever heard of Google??’.

Every few months, someone comes along with a particularly easy-to-Google question, gets shown how easily they could have found out the answer themselves, and starts on a rant about how unhelpful we are, and tells us in no uncertain terms that they’ll never be back.

Well.. good. I support OSS for fun. Repeatedly looking something up in the docs (using the same tool that the user could have used), and pasting the search results into an email isn’t that much fun. It’s the same for most other OSS support routes – nobody’s being paid to do the support, and the user needs to consider the needs of the support people when joining the party. It’s a 2-way thing.

There’s always an alternative route – take out a support contract and pay someone (me, even…) to search Google for you.