Slashdot Mirror
Negotiating Pay for Open Source Work?
OpenSourceforMoney asks: "For about nine months now I've been working on an Open Source software project; the first release was five months ago. It's reasonably popular given its age -- several hundred users at least (users, not downloads) -- but despite my best attempts, I've been unable to get even a few dollars in donations to help support this (and being a student, I really need to get some money from somewhere). Now suddenly I've been approached by a company which wants to pay me to continue working on this project. How should I handle this? Should I ask for an hourly rate, or should I come up with specific targets and attach prices to each? How much money is it reasonable to ask for, for doing work which I'd end up doing (albeit more slowly) even if I wasn't getting paid? How have Slashdot readers handled the transition from working on a project for fun to being paid to work on it?"
I'd charge by the hour. That way you can work on it whenever you have the time (I'm assuming you're still a student). Keep DETAILED records of when you worked on it and what you did during those times, so they can't come back later and claim fraud. Good luck!
-jls
Techno-pagan
$25 an hour and they provide the hardware. flex time. try and get benefits too.
25$ ??? Where do you live? Venezuela? Seriously, if that is your project, don't settle for entry level.
A couple things to consider. Do you want to maintain control of the project? If so negotiate to sell them support but keep development seperate. If I hire you to develop, the goals I give you ARE your goals and the project direction can be wrestled from you. Use your skills to find work but keep your baby as your own.
Hourly rate if you can. Projects ALWAYS take long than you think. Fixed price negotiations are generally bad news for "small shops" and individuals. I've got 22 years under my belt, and this is my experience.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
If you ask for a rate that low to start, you'll be insulting them, and yourself. Asking for a higher rate in the software/design/etc. world shows the customer that you know what you're doing, and you should be treated with respect. If you ask for $25/hr you're admitting that you're a college kid with some spare time, and they will continue to treat you as such, asking for more $50+/hr will command some respect. You can always come down, or negotiate from there, but never ever start for a low rate thinking you'll price yourself out of a job. They want to work with you, so the likelyhood of them walking away without making a counter-offer is almost nil. I'd ask for at least $50/hr, especially if it's going to be a part time thing, no benefits, and no long term plan for what they want to give you. Selling yourself short for technical work is shooting yourself in the foot, in every way!
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
WTF, try $75 per hour. At least $50 per. You are obviously a good person (programmer at least :-) since you've already been working on this a while and so they know your work. Asking to too little might seem like a good thing but it devalues your contribution and drives down others value in the industry.
If your doing good work then you should be paid well. If you terrible then you shouldn't but since they came to you, you have something to offer. Finally I'd be careful of targets unless you can realistically predict how long it will take you to add stuff. After 20 years in the industry I don't always know how long things will take.
Anyway that's my $0.02.
The rule of thumb is that whatever you expect to be your full time salary, you must at least be able to 1.5 times that for your hourly salary to break even (for the lack of other benefits the company offers). $25 is way too cheap to ask.
I have a similar project (DataVision, many hundreds of users, 7 languages, over 30 countries). Two different people have paid me $1K each to implement major features.
Transcript show: self sigs atRandom.
Whichever way you choose, you've made one thing clear: you only have a limited amount of time to do the work.
Besides pay, you should also consider what happens when:
Contracts are there to define what your responsibility is, and the responsibility of another party. It's important to know what would happen if you were getting close to meeting a target, and the other group backs out - would they still have to pay you? If you were paid hourly, would half-written code be worth anything?
It's okay for two groups to be unhappy about a situation, but if you have forgotten to specify the responsibility of each party, then things get nasy. The worst thing that could happen is the project dies... okay not the worst, but it's up there
> sub-contract it to india for 1/5
Been there. Done that.
Ended up with horrible code that didn't work and if by some miracle it did work, it didn't do what we wanted anyway.
Reviews and changes were like pulling teeth.
Communication was nearly impossible.
We all seemed to be speaking the same language. We'd get lots of "yes yes we understand perfectly". But nothing we ever said seemed to make it into the code in any recognizable fashion.
I'll stick with paying U.S. rates, rather than pay 20%, lose the customer, never collect the money, and ruin my reputation.
I'll never outsource overseas again.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
$25/hr...are you serious?
A good programmer, let alone someone who has the initiative to write a signifigant piece of software on their own, is worth no less than $50/hr contract. You have to remember that the actual cost of an employee is around 30% above their base salary.
Ask for $75/hour and negotiate down to no less than $50/hour.
Believe me, I hire people like you and this is what I would pay.
M
that's retarded -- don't be afraid of that scenario.
as the author of the open source package, you're not only an expert in the material but also since you're intimately familiar with every detail you can begin contributing immediately whereas some new hire would take a good deal of time (both his own and possibly a supervisor's time for training) to get up to speed and end up costing a great deal more (especially if a specialist is needed for that position.)
don't be afraid to ask for whatever is fair. probably more than 25 an hour but not more than 50 or 60 if it's not a project that requires extremely specialized knowledge.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
I was doing contract work for a company in '98 that I was making $40/hr on. They billed their client $150/hr for my work.
t'nera semordnilap
and my mentality has always been that if someone needs the software then they'll pay for it to exist, even if they don't want to sell the source code afterwards. And to a large extent, this works. In fat, it works perfectly. I've never had anyone say "well you're writing free software, so why should we pay you?". In fact, often the software I write is for universities, who would rather release the code open source than hang on to it. This is just the mentality that unis have, I guess.