pierre charlus wrote:
Hi,
I just lost my job. I've learned some geospatial stuff. Mapserver,
mapscript, Chameleon, postgis and recently OpenLayers at a university. I
was wondering, since I'd like to go freelance, what's working
(professionally wise) and in what direction I should orient myself as to
make a little cash - enough to make a living without having to cope with
the laborious collateral stuff usually associated with a regular job....
Any advice appreciated.
Regards,
Pierre
Hi,
I have tried to put together some of the more obvious sources of income around
FOSSGIS in the OSGeo Wiki:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Commercial_Services
As it is a Wiki hopefully people will add to and enhance whats there.
Basically you can do all the same things that you earn money with around proprietary software. The only difference is that you cannot sell software usage rights for (proprietary) software. For freelance operation that is not the great source of income anyway. The larger issue will be to satisfy potential customers of your availability and reliability as you cannot build on the background of a large company and - maybe even more relevant - how to make yourself known to potential customers.
I suggest to first off add yourself to the Service provider Directory at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Service_Provider_Directory
Then you might want to start to cooperate with or at least talk to whatever FOSSGIS company is already doing business around your location (if any). This is a friendly gesture because sometimes it is very painful to have business "newbies" mess up price structures that have been consolidated with a lot of talking and confuse customers (i.e. new free lancers tend to be too "cheap"). Ideally they (some company) might even pass on your references to customers that they cannot or do not want to serve.
One of the best entries to the market is to offer high quality (not cheap) trainings to certain topics - MapServer is an ideal starting point. Oftentimes this can be a basis for longer term follow-up business.
Think Global - Act Local.
Best regards,
Arnulf.
--
Arnulf Benno Christl
http://www.osgeo.org
(OSGeo Board Member)
+50.7342N +7.0707E
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