On a recent project I made use of a fantastic library called
Overlib. It fit the project's needs perfectly and allowed me to implement a solution in minutes instead of hours or days. The developer of this library provides it free of charge, and like many other free/open source apps, he had a link to make a donation. If you're anything like me, you've seen these links on any number of pages and perhaps thought: "Who would donate money to some person you don't know?"
Well, I was so grateful to this developer that I actually stopped and considered donating. I thought through what his code had allowed me to do, namely, to finish a project ahead of schedule and move on to yet other billable work. Basically, utilizing this code allowed me as a developer to be more profitable. I don't know what the actual going rate is for developers, but I personally charge about $75 per hour (depending on project size) and I have a feeling I'm on the cheap side. Doing some quick math, this guy saved me 5 - 6 hours easily, maybe more. I don't bill by the hour, but by the project, so if something helps me finish faster that increases my effective hourly rate and makes my clients happier.
As a result, I donated $25 to this particular developer. But then I got to thinking, what about all the other tools I use that make me a more efficient developer: phpAdmin, phpBB, netSpell, etc. And what about PHP and mySQL?? I realized that my very career, if not dependent on these projects, was at least greatly benefited by them. After all this pondering, I have instituted a new personal policy regarding open source projects. For every for-profit development project I quote on, if I plan on using any open source projects or languages, I budget in a small amount to donate to the respective groups/developers. I will not advocate a particular amount or percentage for others to use, but just wanted to put forth the general idea. Even my small dev projects generally have receipts of $1000 or more. It doesn't hurt my bottom line at all to earmark a small amount of that for the developers that make my life a lot easier and quite a bit more profitable.
Posted under the influence of [[Joy Electric :: Such As It Was]]
