I'm starting to get offers from people who want to sponsor features in my CPAN distro, KinoSearch. If I'm fortunate and these continue to come in, I'm going to need a good way of dealing with them.

The first offer was easy, because it was stuff I was going to do anyway and had already planned out. So I just accepted a bounty and a due date.

One problem I see is that you don't want an individual sponsor calling the shots on a public API. That means you have to be very, very careful what you agree to, which implies a large amount of research and planning before accepting the contract. I think it also means putting in a clause inoculating the developer against financial liability should it ever prove necessary to change the API.

There's also the issue of code quality. If somebody wants quick 'n' dirty for standard contract work, no problem -- I can do quick 'n' dirty on the clock. But for open source, that doesn't fly -- it's gotta be right, and it's gotta take as long as it takes. That's either unfair to the client if you're working hourly, or fiscally unsound for the developer if you're working for a fixed fee.

The actual rate isn't a big deal. Laws of supply and demand take care of that -- if somebody wants a feature, they know how much they're willing to pay.

Any thoughts on how to structure such arrangements?

2006-06-14 Retitled by GrandFather, as per Monastery guidelines