[consulting] Costs of forking

[Greg Knaddison]

On 2/8/06, Zack Rosen <zack at civicspacelabs.org> wrote:
> development back to the Drupal community. The general assumption is
> that most clients are oblivious to the mechanics of open-source
> communities and assume that they are paying simply for an engineer to
> develop new functionality and ignore all the time required to work
> with the Drupal community to make sure contributions and patches are
> accepted and merged back.
>

How much time and effort is this?

I do agree that whatever amount is spent people should consider it
when making a quote.  Similarly, I consider my time of sales/wrapup
etc. type of work that I have to do and try to roll that into the
price that I quote customers.  Certainly a "roll patches back into
core" should be included, but I imagine that as a much smaller amount
than the sales part of my work - is that flawed?  How much time is
really spent on this?

Greg