This started as a comment, and it blossomed and became a full fledged blog post. I was responding to someone who, not wanting to defend people who didn't deserve it, did want to point a little to the otherside. And I'm basically in agreement with him.

I don't really have a problem with the initial email I received. I was a little frustrated because I got a bunch of them at once (and oddly, I've gotten more since I posted this) and I realized that if I didn't try to ebb that flow a dam was going to burst. But the real issue to me was his response to my brush-off.

I understand that Drupal is pretty difficult. I spend a lot of time working to make it less difficult and more flexible. Good UI is *hard* and I haven't really created a good UI for Views, merely a passable one. I respect that. But people who follow my blog know that I've been very interested in Drupal's administrative UI and trying to make it both easier to use and more flexible. Sometimes those are the same thing; sometimes they are not.

More than that, good documentation is *really* hard. Keeping good documentation current is ludicrously hard. I know that people need help. I know that Drupal's documentation team needs help. People love to talk about the documentation (both good and bad) but if everyone who spared 5 paragraphs to bitch about how bad the documentation was would spend 5 paragraphs to contribute something to the documentation instead, we'd have a much better system.

It's important, though, that the perspective is kept:

• We're almost all volunteers.
• For most of us, we do this out of passion, not obligation.
• Trying to impose obligation on us decreases that passion, or inflames that passion in a different direction.
• There are avenues for support, but they require patience, and they require effort.
• Lack of proper preparation or understanding on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Open source is free, but it isn't really *free*. It doesn't have a cost in terms of dollars, but it does have a cost in the sense that a lot of the issues around open source are created because of it. People, like this guy, like to hold up the marquee open source projects and say everyone and everything should be like them, but it ignores a number of things. For example, most of the marquee open source projects have significant corporate backing. That cash flow is being used to create a support network that is fueled by something other than passion. Drupal, at the moment, has very little cash flow. There is some corporate backing here and there, but at the moment I'm certainly not part of it.

I dunno. When I reread his email, one thing consistently jumped out at me:

He has a need. And because he has not solved that need, he is trying to impose an obligation upon me. I cannot allow myself to feel guilt because I do not have the time and resources to give personal, one-on-one to everyone. I can feel guilty that we don't have the best tools to make it possible for people to get better support, but I won't fix anything by simply giving support when it is asked. That way lies madness. What I can do is analyze the situation and see if there's anything I can do to help make it easier to get the support that's needed. And that's a tough question. The userbase for Drupal has been growing exponentially, and even though the number of people who stick around and are willing to spend their time giving support are growing at the same pace, it's an exponential comparison, not a linear. Which means the gap is growing. Compare the graphs of 10ⁿ and 2ⁿ. Where n = 1, 10 users per 2 support people, that's 20%. But where n = 8, that's 10,000,000 users and 256 support people, or .002% (give or take a decimal point).

So it's imperative upon Drupal that we continue to work to create a better support network. And part of that work, as contrary as it sounds, is to reject methods of support that detract from our ability to provide wider, better support.