Paying open source project members for bug fixes and features

Question

I have a problem to solve that I think will take 4 days, but if I had a feature request sorted and a snapshot release then I reckon I could have it done in one. Superficially this creates a budget of 3 x my daily rate to get it the feature-request actioned.

So my questions are, have you ever paid an O/S project member to fix something for you? Did it work out OK? How did you sell the idea to your manager / colleagues and where did the money come from?

Most importantly how did you go about asking nicely? Is there an etiquette for these things? Are the project leaders likely to be receptive to the idea?

In case it matters, the software with the the missing feature is a JBoss project - the home of professional open source - and I'm able to claim expenses as I'm a contractor.

Answer 1

At work, we've had good luck hiring open source maintainers to enhance libraries that we use.

Here are some projects we've done in the past:

1. We needed to integrate Quake 2 with wxWidgets. We hired Vadim Zeitlin, a major contributor to wxWidgets. In less than 4 days, he built a wxQuake2 widget by adapting the Windows version of Quake 2.
2. Later on, we needed to portable access to raw bitmaps. So we hired Vadim again, and worked with him to produce a new raw bitmap API. This involved a substantial bit of design work, but we really liked the resulting API, and we use it to this day.
3. At a later date, we hired another one of the core contributors to improve wxWidgets accessibility support. As it turned out, we ended up not using this code right away, for various technical reasons. But other people have been enhancing this code since then, and we hope to use it some day.

In other words, hiring open source maintainers is a lot like hiring any other kind of contractor. But some things are a bit different, too. Here's some advice based on our experiences:

1. You'll have the most luck if you want to enhance an existing project and release the changes as open source.
2. In general, you want to hire members of the core team. They have the best track records, they're the most productive, and they have the best chance of getting your changes merged upstream.
3. You want to get your changes merged upstream. If you don't, you'll be maintaining a local fork, which is a headache.
4. Before hiring, do some research. Who works on the features you care about? Are they somebody you'd enjoy working with? Read the mailing lists and glance at the version control history, and pick out a few people to approach.
5. During the design phase, there may be a bit of give-and-take. The developers are looking at the larger health of the project, and you're looking at the needs of a specific business. This has occasionally made negotiations a bit more complicated for us, but the final result has typically been a better design than we would have chosen on our own.

And most importantly, don't be shy. In any sufficiently large open source project, several members of the core team will already run consulting businesses. In smaller open source projects, you'll generally find several contributors who want to run consulting businesses.

And if you're still hesitant to approach somebody, you can always ask, "Do you know anybody who'd be interested in getting paid to work on $FEATURE?" If they're not interested, you haven't put them on the spot, and they may tell you who to ask.

On the whole, we've been impressed with the professionalism and productivity of open source maintainers, and I would recommend this route for others.