I was looking at this old thread http://drupal.org/node/16189 and thinking about some work I've been offered recently and just wanted others thoughts on being payed for setting up free software.
I do very little coding and am learning what I can, nonetheless, I've already seen that I can get a decent site running faster then those who have approached me as potential clients. I guess what I'm realizing is that knowledge of an open source software, like Drupal is an expertise. Anybdody can learn it, but not all take the time to. If you gave me enough time, I could probably also learn how to do an appendectomy, but I'm not gonna, so a Dr. gets paid instead- plus all the medical board issues but you get the point.
Wait, do I have a point. Maybe it is time for a quick story. Someone approached me as a potential client and started asking a bunch of questions. A price was set for what the job would cost and how long it would take. They asked me more questions under the guise of "researching for how they want the site themed" etc. Finally, I had explained enough about how to use Drupal for their purposes that they realized that a family member who had some basic website knowledge could do it for free. Job lost.
If this person had approached me in a forum I would have happily answered and explained to the best of my ability how to do what they wanted with Drupal for free. In this situation, I feel a bit cheated. I provided them with my expertise (okay, I've only been at Drupal and other CMS's for a year, but read and learned a lot) and got $0 for it. Had they done the research on their own it would have taken at least a month to weed through the various open source system out there and figure out how to leverage Drupal for their purposes.
So what is everyone else's take/slash experience on this? On the one hand, I feel like I'm undercutting the whole open source philosophy by charging at all for something freely available. On the other, I've seen how non tech people struggle to even post sometimes on a CMS and could spend a whole day, probably week some of them, to figure out how to upload the site, create the database, and connect--I've been there myself. Fire away!
Comments
Knowledge is "power"
If you know something about something which someone else does not, you can charge for it. Wether you do this or not depends on the situation, how you judge it or approach it. Just because something is given free don't mean you cannot either ask or make money trough it. The only ethical problem I see is with taking the Drupal code, act like you created it and not contribute anything back in any form. Drupal (as well as other open/free software projects) can be a base or a platform for people to apply work around. One can be creative with something open and free and as long as you recognize the source, or root of in this case Drupal, then personally I see no ethical problems in making money off of it. Actually it can strengthen Drupal because that way you are more likely to support Drupal in the first place. Not all contributions need be based on code alone.
Richard Stallman, the creator of the GPL (a zealot, but sometimes principles are what you need), wrote this about this, might be interesting to you: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
It's your time ... do what you want with it ...
There is always someone who wants something for free, and they usually take the approach you described. But ... in a forum is one thing where you go to participate, and being buttonholed in person on someone else's agenda is something else.
So, you got taken advantage of ... get over it and work out exactly what YOU feel comfortable with, not what someone else is willing to offer you for your time. What makes you feel good after you are done is what's important. Feeling bad afterwards is the worst way to have things turn out ... get my point? feel good afterwards - good. Feel bad afterwards - NO WAY JOSE! :)
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LeBlank
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LeBlank
Don't fret.
You are providing a service. As Lapurd pointed out, you really should read RMS' essays on Free Software. You are a skilled person helping others to use Free Software. Free is about Freedom of speech, not the price of Beer.
Think of it this way, you are a cook who is using a Free recipe and fresh produce (Drupal's source code) from an organic farm to make a delicious meal (a website) for your customers...Your customers get a copy of the recipe and have the choice to learn how to cook for themselves. They can either keep coming to you to prepare their dishes, or they can learn how to cook for themselves. The choice is their own, but the beauty of Free Software is that they have a choice...They can choose to educate themselves and feed themselves. They could also go back to McDonalds (aka proprietary software) and get a #3 super sized.
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Code Orange: Drink Your Juice
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Code0range: Drink Your Juice
setups
Setting up Drupal as a CMS and designing a good and usable site for someone is not necessarily the same skill. Reading the instructions, any number of people can setup a website, and with Drupal, it will even look good. It goes beyond that though. The first site I set up for my sister-in-law's business sucks. I mean it works for what it does, but it could easily be so much more. We finally have a plan to correct that.
As for potential clients ......
You are going to have to decide how to handle this now. Once the price is set, get a signed statement of work or something and start work. If they want to 'research it', then suggest they check out the Drupal forums. Freely admit that they could probably setup Drupal themself, however you can point out that setting up Drupal is not the skill you are selling, leveraging your knowledge to build out a web site for the customer is.
-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
I suggest to ask for a
I suggest to ask for a deposit (partial advance payment) on the agreed price before starting the real work.
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Drupal services
My Drupal services
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Drupal services
My Drupal services
In most cases, just tell
In most cases, just tell them what is possible and what is not? Don't tell them how to do it without charging? Just say in a nice way that all you answer before the project is started is what you can do, not how you would go about it. That's the job, and wether you or your clients do it, will be up to them. However, it's the knowledge you sell as the software is freely available.
Open source benefit from having people make money on it, so I don't see any ethical issues there.
Drupal Nightmare: Same problem from other side
I'm an investor an a relatively high-volume website; we've been featured on the Drupal homepage. The managers of my site hired a well-known, well regarded Drupal firm to migrate the site from a (barely) functional but messy batch of PHP routines to Drupal. There was nothing hidden: every piece of content in the new site would be from the old site, but it all needed to be placed under the TLC of Drupal.
Despite the ultimate specification -- a fully built-out, functional website -- the job was bid hourly. My managers listened to their consultants and agreed to the "bargain" rate of $165/hr so, no, this wasn't a fly-by-night person from eLance or something. Needless to say, despite that it was a standard LAMP stack and everything was well defined and didn't change they went well over their hours. Finally, after about $120K (about a 30-percent overage from the initial quote), my company had a barely functional Drupal site.
By barely I mean barely. There was no handover training or documentation so we have no idea how to fix/change/update anything. The custom code they wrote contains NO documentation -- not even in-line docs in custom written PHP code -- despite that they said they conformed to Drupal best practices that require it. Traffic plunged and the bounce-rate spiked to 80-percent on some pages; my day-to-day staff has no idea how to fix it (they know the content changes needed; just don't know how to make them). I have the pleasure of trying now to fix it all (and, for those wandering what'll happen to the firm, that includes hiring lawyers to hopefully do to the consulting firms business what they did to mine).
In short, I know that Drupal has a great reputation but I wish we'd never heard of it, touched it, or gotten anywhere near it. It's caused enormous pain, dramatically slowed down our ability to innovate, and -- according to our still well-regarded consultants -- all this is just fine with the Drupal community. I guess site owners who pay six figures in fees and rely on your expertise are owed pretty much nothing in return under the Drupal ethical code.
Like I said, I'm an investor so don't even really have time to fix all this but first need to understand the depth of the pain so I'm picking through the mess. There's no more budget to hire somebody else to patch it, and in any event I don't believe in throwing good money after bad: I'd rather write off Drupal and start from scratch (while making it real clear to our 4+ million yearly users, and the whole world, what happened).
Since the Drupal consulting firm has gone entirely incommunicado -- really a temporary non-option that'll bite them in the butt as they stumble to explain to a jury why their behavior was reasonable -- I guess I'm relying on the rest of the community to decide whether there are any ethical standards. That is, do the developers here really believe gobbling up six-figures of cash and leaving a dirty diaper with no documentation is acceptable, like this firm says, or is this just a rogue consulting firm well outside the standards the Drupal community endorses, which I suspect is the case.
Looking forward to any feedback and always happy to answer questions.
Michael.
PS: You've noticed I haven't named either the site or the firm. I haven't named the former because we're embarrassed; basically the same reason companies rarely call the police when hacked. I haven't named the latter because I'd like them to identify themselves; at least pretend to be grown-up's, which is something I haven't seen so far.
Michael Olenick
olenick at valueinnovation.net
First thing, Michael, you
First thing, Michael, you should start a new topic.
Essentially as you are probably aware, you cannot blame Drupal. It was your business decision to employ this firm at $165 an hour without any strings attached. Did you look around at other firms and get quotes? Did you have a clause saying you wouldn't pay until such and such was functional?
Nothing you have said in your post indicates any fault with Drupal which as we know is functioning very well on a large number of sites around the globe.
Drupal is meant to enable people to create websites at low cost. Its modular design and user controlled interface means that it takes some hits in efficiency but in return you get access to all kinds of functionality for little or no cost AND you have the benefit of a world wide web of knowledgable developers. With your kind of money you may have been better off getting a reputable (and I mean reputable) firm to create a proprietory application that is designed specifically for your needs.
Regarding documentation: This is an IT best practice and not something that is Drupal's responsibility. A software developer in any language on any application should be providing adequate documentation. The ethics you allude to are ethics that should cover ALL developers and not just Drupal ones. However since software development is not potentially life threatening, software developers do not have their ethics monitored as happens with Doctors, by some Big Brother organization. Again it comes down to your due diligence, or lack of.
BTW. Was this firm based out of Nigeria by any chance? You have obviously been ripped off. But, yes, I feel for you.
Passing Phase Web Development
As much as I agree with your
As much as I agree with your point, I don't see any reason for you to attack Nigeria. The man did his business badly he should have stipulated that he needed some kind of documentation and training before payment. And BTW I'm a Nigerian in the Web development community and I don't know any so called big Nigerian Drupal firms. What I do know is that the developer community in Nigeria are an honorable and hardworking bunch and we value our reputations more than anything else. Reading through the story I'm disappointed that you had to jump to that conclusion. Whatever your experience with Nigerians I can say proudly that the IT community don't rip people off especially those of us that use Drupal.
I'm a Nigerian and I'm proud of it
www.adetoyan.com
Nigerians
I don't think that comment was aimed at the Nigerian developer community. I suspect it was more of a reference to the Nigerian email scammers.
Michelle
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Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.
thanks michelle I don't mean
thanks michelle I don't mean to turn this into an argument but the site has been built and abandoned by the developer without documentation or training and he's asking if the site was built by a Nigerian firm. There's a lot of meaning in that statement.
I'm a Nigerian and I'm proud of it
www.adetoyan.com
I apologise if you were
I apologise if you were offended, but as was suggested the comment was based on the reputation for a lot of internet fraud to come out of Nigeria. I do know that there are people in Nigeria working 9 to 5 fleecing money out of people all round the world through email scams, dating sites etc. and that is a reputation that unfortunately you have to live with until someone cleans it up. I've just recently seen news footage inside workplaces where it takes place. Apart from being illegal it is a nuisance and has caused many people immense pain. But as you rightly point out, this does not include software developers and I apologise again. I was not aware that there was a Drupal community in Nigeria. I have learnt something new.
I find it hard to believe that someone handed over $125,000 for a Drupal site, when in my knowledge most Drupal sites cost around $10,000 so I was a little gobsmacked at the scale of this complainant's misadventure and I have to wonder if some level of misrepresentation did take place.
Passing Phase Web Development
$10K
That's probably on the low end, actually. $125K isn't unreasonable for a large site. There are Drupal sites that cost multiple millions. Handing over that much without formalized procedures and contracts is rather unusual, though.
Michelle
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Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.
it's alright. I just needed
it's alright. I just needed to make people understand that they shouldn't stereotype Nigerians. We legitimate workaholics are feeling the brunt of their schemes; we have unnecessary restrictions all over the internet which affects how we work .We're doing the best we can to deal with the scammers as individuals but the government doesn't help because they're doing next to nothing about the issue and FYI most of them have started moving to Asian countries to escape the stereotype. As per the web development community I've met a lot of really talented and principled ones a few of them use Drupal. We don't really have a community as such but we have individuals that have taken the plunge. Drupal is a difficult software to learn and IMO the scammers are too lazy to dive in there. Hopefully if they can see the gains of honest work like building websites and applications we can change them one at a time.
I'm a Nigerian and I'm proud of it
www.adetoyan.com
Wow
I'm really sorry this happened to you. It's not something most folks in the community would condone. But we are a large community. If you look at your UID you'll see we're past 500K users. There are folks who are experts in Drupal and there are some that barely have a clue. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of research sometimes to determine who is who when hiring. I'm mostly a hobbyist so I don't know a lot about the business end of thigns, but don't you usually have milestones where certain items must be complete before sending off the next check?
As the other poster said, this isn't really Drupal's fault. Drupal is software. You could have inserted Joomla into your story and had the same thing. There's going to be good and bad firms in any piece of software.
And, yeah, you might want to start your own post rather than continuing on this one that has been dormant for 4 years. :) But it's gotten bumped up so maybe folks will see it.
Michelle
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Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.
postmortem analysis
Michael, I am genuinely sadden by your loss (financially, time, dreams, etc.) and completely empathize with your frustration and anger, but you can't blame the technology. The same thing could have happened no matter what the technology, whether it be Rails, .net or some other CMS.
I don't want to beat up on you too much in your time of despair, but I can't help but wonder how you allowed things to spiral so out of control. Surely you must have seen red flags or had reasons to be concerned along the way. And agreeing to pay the vendor by the hour (especially at an excessively high rate even by high-caliber web development shop standards) for a large lengthy project was sheer insanity. What motivation did they have to finish on-time, on-budget and according to spec?
Make no mistake, there's no excuse for what the vendor did to you. They must have realized somewhere along the way that the project wasn't coming together as planned and they should have raised awareness and offered alternatives. At some point they clearly crossed an ethical line (if in fact one ever existed) and continued to milk the cash cow with reckless abandonment because no one from your group was holding them accountable.
Again, I don't understand how something like this was allowed to happen.
I know this is pretty old,
I know this is pretty old, but I liked the story and I'd like to contribute :P
Well I felt the same for a bunch of times. Lots of years ago when I started using PC I discovered how installing Windows is easy, and couldn't believe how expensive some companies were charging. I felt they were robbing and told everybody I knew to not pay it.
Years later I realized that was their job, that they had to play employees, taxes, renting, etc... they had bills to pay and also wanted profit. I on the othe hand, learned it by myself and did it by myself, on my home, and realized it was just my hobby. I had no bill to pay, no employee, and didn't depend on it to financially live. Later on I realized that I was (most often) pretty good on fixing my stuff, but when I faced other ppl problems I took much longer times to realize the problem and fix it.
And when that happened, I used to do it for free, just helping ppl for pleasure of helping, but I started finding myself being required too much and even demanded. Somebody even phoned me on midnight once to tell they got a virus...
Then I realized that along with the service, these companies charge for the stress to deal with ppl, and for the responsibility of offering a good job and offering a posterior free support for a lot of questions and complains!
In this topic, I don't see much difference between open source and proprietary software. Open source just tends to have bigger and more helpful communities, while proprietary software tends to offer good quality support from experts paid and trained by the company. But both of those don't happen always too...
Yes, we have a lot of freely info available, while we also have books and classes to teach. We spend time and effort learning. And while we learn, we get experience and do stuff better and faster.
That family member didn't know as much as you, and of course he won't do an as good job as you'd do. If he was really able to, he'd do it to start off, or he'd at least research and learn how to do it, and not look for you. You after 1 year of hard work has the answers to a lot of problems that you faced, you know the solution for a lot of needs. And you didn't pass all this info on that explanation...
That guy probably found a lot of problems while doing the job, and or he took much more time than you'd take to do it, or just did it poorly at all.
What you did was "advisory", you as an expert explained to somebody noob how to do it, you explained them how to do it instead of doing it yourself. You gave them the necessery info so that they could do it themselves.
Why you should have charged for it? Because you took your working time to explain, because you passed your personal knowledge, and because you were a professional before them. Inside forums on the other hand, we are looking for free info, and nobody is forced to answer. We answer when we know to keep the community yp, so that when we need help we get it too. And even on that, this forum has a section where ppl can offer and request paid services!
Anyway, that was a lession for you. You must give attention and explain your job to possible customers, but not explain everything you do to them, if your objective is do it. If they want answers, charge them for those answers. If they want the job done, talk only the necessary to show confiance and to gather their needs, and just do it for them.
If you are doing is as a profession, they must pay. If they don't wanna pay, go look for somebody that would accept doing it for free (for exemple, to have an opportunity to do it and learn), or go learn and do it themselves!
This topic has been restarted
This topic has been restarted because of comment: http://drupal.org/node/20989#comment-1727286. You are responding to a dead topic.
Michael, this is a clear illustration of why you should start a new topic. Again due diligence is required in order to make sure that you are doing the right thing, whether that involves hiring a builder, a PR consultant, a Drupal developer or starting a topic at drupal.org. With respect to the latter you have clearly failed and created ambiguity and incoherence with this thread.
Passing Phase Web Development
my 5 cents
jasonwhat,
I understand you very well as I had some similar bad experience in the past.
My advise to you would be to take a deposit, a percentage of the negotiated /or fixed/ price and then begin to work on a project. And never give out your technical secrets to customers, especially when it concerns your job. You can and must teach them how to work with your product (no matter what it is - a Drupal based website or a car), but only from user point of view. If you buy a new car they give you an user manual, but they don't give you schematics on how to replace some parts of the engine, right ?
Drupal maybe free, but your work is not. And these are 2 very different things - a free tool cannot do the job itself - it needs a professional to operate with it. If it was not this way - then the salary would be paid to the hammer, not to the carpenter. You get my point :)
So, there are 3 mistakes which you should avoid in the future :
1. Negotiate on exactly what is expected from you - in this case - to build a website or to give consultation on how to develop with Drupal ?
2. Strive to stick with what was negotiated and act accordingly. If at some point they decide they want more - then you need to negotiate an additional payment and conditions.
3. Always, always take deposit before starting the job. I personally do not consider anybody to be my customer until they pay me deposit (usually 20-50% of the negotiated price). Of course I provide them with the respective document, that they've paid a deposit, so everything is legal and the customer knows their interests are protected by law.
Now few words to Michael - this is very unfortunate, that you've paid such money to a loosy company (needless to say, I know). This is very unprofessional and you should put them on trial. You should check your contract with that company and see what went wrong and off the contract, so you can put a claim on them to recover damages (to compensate for the bad work and return the payment).
By the way this is a very high fee, what country do you live in? In my country this is impossible to charge for a website so high. Even corporations don't pay more than 10-20 000 euros.
Actually in the US/Canada,
Actually in the US/Canada, there are quite a lot of projects that are over $100,000 in value. I think this is true for the UK too. I dont know much about other markets though.
Without mentioning the names of the sites, over 70% of the major publishing/high traffic sites that we learn about at Drupal Con are over $300,000 projects.
Most sites with over 300,000 unique visitors/month cost that kind of money.
Even hosting can take a month to plan and implement.
Arnold
www.appnovation.com