I routinely monitor the Sun Forums for Sun Studio (programming development suite for C, C++, and Fortran on Solaris and Linux).
Customer questions often turn out to have simple answers – get the current patch, set an environment variable – or are the result of not having understood the directions in the documentation. This low-overhead channel means that customers are up and running again quickly. Since Sun Studio is free, the forums also eliminate the barrier of needing a service contract to find out how to get started. ("It's free but you have pay to find out how to use it" would work against the point of making the product free.)
One case from this week will serve to illustrate the point. The customer had rather complex C++ source code including 3rd-party code. The compiler always crashed at the same point while trying to compile some of the 3rd-party code. Since we explicitly support this 3rd-party code, I wanted to find out what the problem was. I had the customer send me the offending file, but for me the compiler did not crash. I had the customer investigate his computing environment, and we found that the local sysadmin had set a rather low limit on stack size for each process. The compiler simply ran out of stack space. He had the sysadmin raise the stack limit to a realistic limit, and the code compiled without further problems.
So now we have a happy customer, who might otherwise have simply given up on Sun Studio.
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