al davis wrote: > Why all that overhead? > > The people who made the software have already established a > track record. Anyone funding it will do so based on that. We > don't need the middleman. They can just send a check.
An advantage of electronic payments is that they can be done internationally with little fuss by credit card. > I can't see paying just anyone who comes along for enhancements > to an active project. Well, that's up to the client to decide, isn't it? > The only place I see for broadcast bounties I see is to get > something new. I have been considering offering a bounty for > someone to make a good quality replacement for autotools. It's > even on GNU's list of needs, but they want to do in in guile > which is a mistake. It must be written entirely in "make" > and /bin/sh. Client says: "I need bug #123456 fixed and I'm willing to pay you $250 to get to the head of the line." Or Client says: "I want intrinsic support for imaginary numbers, and I'm willing to pay $475 to get this working." > Steve: At a OSEDA dinner you told me that you have had some > paying customers, who paid you for Icarus Verilog improvements. > You said it was not enough to quit the day job, but it sounded > like a lot of money to me, compared to average salaries where I > live. > > What arrangements do you have? How do you negotate? Etc.... That has dried up and I haven't got new work along those lines. I was basically hired on as a consultant, with a consulting contract and 1099s. It worked for a little while because it was ongoing so didn't require a fresh contract for each little task. But it did bind me to them as I have finite time to enter into multiple time commitments. That sort of thing is really only practical if people can get their company to enter into a contract. It requires negotiations and approvals and legal department's sign off -- Phone calls, paper mails back and forth for signatures, etc. Not at all conducive to impuse buying:-) A boiler-plate contract helps somewhat. The market I'm hoping to tap into is the little one-offs that can be expensed without all these negotiations. There are plenty of $200 tasks that a client can just expense with only the sign-off of a supervisor after the fact. All they need is a receipt. If someone wants to contract me (er um geda developer) for ongoing support, that's a separate path that doesn't need this kind of lubrication. -- Steve Williams "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. steve at icarus.com But I have promises to keep, http://www.icarus.com and lines to code before I sleep, http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep." _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user