Re: Features for hire?

[Harold L Hunt <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Frederic,

> However, it depends how you manage to contribute with the
> paid development to the XFree project. I mean, would such
> development be made available to the community after a
> while (say 3 months or more for example) ?

Oh no, that was exactly the misunderstanding that I was trying to avoid.

I would only develop ``open source'' features.  Businesses could get a
contract for a given feature to be developed (in an open source fashion) now,
rather than whenever someone feels like implementing that feature.  They could
also give some specs for what the feature would entail.  The imagined scenario
is some business that says, ``we would like to stop using SuperDuper-X by the
end of the quarter because it costs us $5000 per year, but we can only use
Cygwin/XFree86 if it has feature Y, which will only cost us $500-$2000 to get
created now.''  Their alternative is to wait for the feature to be randomly
implemented.  They may wait a day, a month, a year, or they may be waiting for
a feature that never gets implemented.  With a contract they get their feature
when they want it.  The code is immediately open-sourced, and that's part of
why the price is so low.  The price would be more like $5000-$10000 or higher
if this were a proprietary product.

There would never be an XNonFree project and as I said, I'm not going to work
any less on free Cygwin/XFree86 improvements.  I would merely allow my
schedule to be ``persuaded'' :)

> A second point is who can pay such services ?
> Business company, yes of course.
> Government company ? I don't know how it works in other
> countries than mine, but in mine the government can not
> easily paid for a development, and they need to do it
> with legal stuff (such as official publication to ask for
> different offers and so on).

That's a good point about governments.  I recall hearing that if the price is
low enough on a PO then there does not have to be a bidding process.  The
price cap for bidding probably varies greatly among governments, but I suspect
that no bidding occurs for any purchase order for less than roughly $1000. 
Below that there isn't much point to bidding.

> To finish, what I have observed around me is people proposing
> their services and knowledge for money on "open source" product.
> That's perfect because that's what often the companies need :
> the knowledge and the service.

This is pretty much a development service that I'm proposing.  I'm not sure
what other services a company would require for Cygwin/XFree86.

Harold