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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?"
$25 an hour and they provide the hardware. flex time. try and get benefits too.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
1. Start open source project.
2. Ask slashdot why I'm not getting paid.
3. ???
4. Profit!
They are solid. Either a feature is present and functioning or it's not. No need to quarrel over hours.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Don't forget that if you start getting paid for your work it opens up a whole new slew of responsibilities. You might not be able to slack off as much as you like, etc. It gets harder when you have to answer to someone.
on what this piece of software is, and how valuable it is to them. if it would cost them $20k to design it themselves and would be worth it for them to spend $5k for you to do it, then quote them that. but you need to sit down with them and come up with a approx time which it will be completed, how many hours you'd be putting in, etc. also, is there other software out there that does this, compare what you would charge to what it would cost to buy commercial software. will you be providing support, or development only. there's more than just what should i charge, you need to do a little investigation into what the company wants and what's out there, and how long it would take you to do this
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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.
The more important the project is to you, the more you should ask. The less it matters (personally) the lighter your demands. As an artist, I charge more for paintings I personally favor. Do not try to negotiate a payment for what you have already given away freely by inflating your offer; you've given it away, and there is somebody else who could continue your work more cheaply. (Even if they are n't looking for one, it leads to resentment, as it's tacky.
Whatever you ask for, choose the offer that leaves doors open for the future. Avoid killing a golden-egg goose. If you are getting paid to pursue what you would do of your own accord, you are getting a good deal. The dream of capitalsim. And if the company you are working for thinks it's a steal to have you develop for them, so be it!
Looks good for your age..
You should bid the project out in it's entirety then sub-contract it to india for 1/5 what they are paying you. :) EVERYBODY WINS!!!!! :)
They get their project
Some indian Programmer gets paid a great wage for his market
You get your cut and can do something else
I was in this situation a few years ago, when a company wanted some mods done to a camera-control library I had written and publish on sourceforge. Because they were a well-funded company, I charged them an hourly rate. However, because they were funding an open-source project, and because their changes were fairly small, I was willing to give them a break. I charged $50 an hour - less than half what I would have charged on a project for proprietary code.
I'd suggest you take into consideration who the company is, what they want to do with the code, and what their financial situation is. For example, I wouldn't charge a big, well-established company the same I would charge a non-profit.
Also make sure the company understands who owns the code you produce. Many companies don't understand how open-source licenses work, and might assume that, because they've paid for it, your code belongs to them and doesn't continue to fall under the restrictions of your chosen license. Understand your license fully and make sure the company that's paying understands it too. (Just to avoid disputes in the future, you might want to capture that understanding in your contract, or in a side agreement.)
Make sure it is explicite that the code you write is your Copyright. Make sure the clasue Work-for-hire or anything to that effect is not in there.
The difference is major. If you do it as work for hire, they own it. If you do it and own the copyright, you are building equity.
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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.
I'll address this issue from the other side. About 1.5 years ago, my former employer wanted/needed to replace an aging application that was shared source. That application had been customized by a former employee, but the original perl source was deliberately obfuscated, and the customizations were an ugly hack, completely undocumented, and had been done by an employee who was later fired.
I found a GPLed project that would meet all our needs except for a couple of missing features. I took that to my boss and suggested we pay the author to add what we needed and GPL that code as part of the main project. This was approved in principle, so I contacted the author.
We quickly negotiated a set price for the features we wanted, and I took that back to management for approval. It was quickly approved, and he got to work on the things we needed. It was a real win for everybody. We got all we asked for and then some, at a great price. Because we were (at that time) the largest deployment of that software in the world, it got the most thorough workout and bug discovery process of its life and many fixes of previously unknown bugs resulted from our testing and use.
It would have been much harder to sell management on an hourly rate. Since I was able to go to management with a list of what we needed and a concrete price to get those things, the deal was approved almost immediately, with no dissent. Every level of management, from my boss to the top, liked the fact that they could put a specific, reasonable price on it rather than an open-ended situation that they would have had with a per-hour contract.
I was just wondering...
How could you tell?
Most evil is done by good people, and not by accident, but deliberately; motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
Many years ago, (mid 80s) a friend of mine was working at a lab which, among other things, had a small handfull of UNIX boxes (SGI, SUN, Vax). He managed to finagle me the right to use the equipment in off times to do some of my own computing research (strange sorting techniques, mostly).
While using the machines, I noticed that there were some problems with the way that they were set up, so I also spent some time cleaning up the admin (for whatever reason, I also got the root PW).
In time, his boss found out what I was doing and he came to me with a speech along the lines of: I notice that you've been doing some work on our machines, but in doing some inquiries, it seems that you're not a member of this lab this department, or -- for that matter, not even a current staff or student at the University. This means that if something were to go wrong, theres nobody who could really take responsibility for you being here or what you're doing, and I really don't have the right to ask you to do specific things.
So either you're going to have to accept payment for what you're doing here, or I'm going to have to stop comming here. With some surprise and shock, I chose the former option. He then asked me how much I wanted to be paid for my time.
I quoted him a number which was a bit over twice the minimum wage, and he frowned at me. After thinking for a moment, he offered me a different number -- about twice what I'd offered him. His explanation was that he wanted to pay me enough to ensure that I wouldn't be hired out from under him by the first yokum to come along.
I think that it's very human to underestimate the value of the work that we do -- especially when we enjoy doing that work. All I would really suggest is that you trust that they see value in the work that you're doing, and they know far better than you how much money it's making them (My guess is "lots"). Be willing to stretch yourself in accepting that valuation, and asking enough that you're not regretting the decision later and don't have to make a pained choice later on between staying with a project that you enjoy or going off to a 'real' job that might be less enjoyabe, but would better support your lifestyle.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.