[consulting] Costs of forking

[Zack Rosen]

On Feb 8, 2006, at 9:45 PM, Greg Knaddison wrote:

> 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?

Good question.  We need to figure out accurate ways of estimating  
this work so customers can be given accurate estimates up front.  My  
sense is that the costs associated with getting core patches  
committed vs. contrib patches is going to be very different.

My very rough guesses are...

core patches: 20 hours community involvement X $100 an hour = $2,000  
per patch
contrib patches: 10 hours community involvement X $100 an hour =  
$1,000 per patch

Anyone else with more experience have more accurate guesses?

-Zack
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