Zach's Journal - How to fix bugs in someone else's software

Tim Kerchmar has written an excellent article about working with a vendor to debug a problem. His specific context is working with Roger Corman, but the advice applies in many other situations. For example, I think Lisp library authors are in the same boat as one-man vendors, except you aren't paying them.

Here's a bit of it:

1. If the software vendor is a one man shop, support is a distraction from other work. He is not sitting around hitting refresh on his email waiting for the next question to answer. Your good attitude about this frustrating bug in his product will go a long way towards his feelings of good will.
2. You don't want to piss him off. He's probably the only guy in the world who knows this software product deeply, and if you couldn't trivially solve the bug from header files or documentation, you're going to need his help.
3. When it comes to support, you get what you pay for, although the author's pride in his product can go a small ways.
4. He is one person. The official term for you is "user". There are lots of you guys clamoring for his time.
5. If you do your homework, he will do his.
6. Don't distract him with your bad spelling or grammar.