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Rates for Professional Services (Effective January, 2012)

Open Source Work (US $70/hour)

• Development/modification of re-usable open source software and documentation, including any modifications to VirtualGL, TurboVNC, libjpeg-turbo, and TigerVNC that are checked back into the project repositories
• Non-company-specific support (support for an open source project that is conducted through public channels, such as mailing lists or SourceForge)

The Sponsorship Model

When you pay for open source development, you are sponsoring the development of specific features/fixes in a specific open source project. This is different from the proprietary model of development with which many companies may be familiar. When contracting with a software developer, a company will usually secure their rights to the code by asking the developer to sign an intellectual property agreement that assigns ownership of the code to the company. With open source code, however, your rights to the code are automatically granted through the open source license, not through a contract. The open source license is such that your company-- and anyone else-- can use the software freely, even though you don't technically own the IP associated with it.

You can think of open source software as a "pay it forward" system. Whereas your investment in an open source project produces technology that others can also leverage, others have already paid for the technology that your company is currently leveraging. Thus, the advantage to your company from investing in open source is that you can pay for only the enhancements/fixes that you need rather than paying for the whole product. You can also get free testing resources from the community, assuming others are interested in the feature for which you are paying. The disadvantage is that your company does not "own" the code whose development you are sponsoring, nor can you be guaranteed any competitive advantage from it (if you need a time-to-market advantage, then that can be provided through "off-project development" -- see below.)

Proprietary Work (US $85/hour)

• Development of company-specific code (either proprietary or non-reusable open source)
  • "Non-reusable open source" describes modifications to an open source project that cannot generally be leveraged by anyone outside of your company. (Re-usable open source code can be developed at reduced rates in part because it generates its own leads. It is often the case that one company will pay to develop a new feature, and another company will later pay to enhance it.)
• "Off-Project Development": In order to secure a time-to-market advantage from a new feature, your company can pay for a new feature to be developed in a private repository and for it, and any builds made from it, to be treated as confidential for a specified length of time. After that, the code will be merged into the public project.
• General consulting, including writing/responding to e-mails from your company, conference calls, and providing company-specific support
• On-site work (U.S. and Canada only)
  • Any work completed away from the home office is billed at the proprietary rate, as is travel time to/from your site.
  • All travel expenses, including airfare, lodging, rental car (or other reasonable transportation), and meals (or a reasonable per diem), must be paid by your company.

Priority and Overtime Work (Above Rates * 1.5)

• "Priority" means that everything else will be dropped, and full attention will be given to your issue until it is resolved.
• "Overtime" is defined as any hours beyond 8 hours/day on weekdays or any hours on weekends that are necessary to complete a non-priority project in a timeframe specified by your company.

Priority and overtime work requires written agreement by both parties and is subject to availability.