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Last active August 2, 2020 21:50
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Within 12 hours of sending this email I got an apology. Sometimes it's better to write this out than quickly fire a customer.
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response-to-abusive-customer.md

There is nothing wrong in wanting to feed our families.

If I wanted to profit, I would stop selling digital versions of our books and only do printed versions. The last time we did that was for Two Scoops of Django 1.6, which made more than 1.5, 1.8, and 1.11 combined. That's the only way to put a halt to digital piracy: don't sell digital works. But that denies people in a lot of places access to our works. And means we're about pedagogy over profit.

We give hundreds of unpaid hours per year to open source projects. For years, every single book we've released we've given hundreds of print copies away as charity. Through books, articles, and open source contributions we have furthered people's knowledge around the world for over a decade.

All this means we're running a charity for the Python and Django community. These live classes are our means to hopefully do open source work for a living, with a few classes per month to cover our bills.

Can we make more money building apps for other people? Absolutely! How do you think we got the funds to start this company? We would much rather make money doing open source, teaching, and writing.

Let me ask you five questions:

  1. Do you give anything back to the software community?
  2. Do you teach beginners?
  3. Do you contribute to open source or just open help tickets?
  4. Do you financially support open source projects?
  5. Do you ever talk to content creators in a respectful way?

I'm asking because as far as my google and github search skills can tell, the answer to those questions is "no". So before you accuse us of things that are patently untrue, I'm going to insist you look in the mirror.

If my response offends you, if you don't want to be our customer, that's fine with me. You willfully misinterpreted Carla's response and your online history is not flattering. I'm not altogether certain I want you as a customer. In fact, I'm not certain I ever want to talk to you in the context of open source.

Think carefully about your response, I have a history of firing abusive customers and blocking abusive users from my open source projects.

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