[consulting] Costs of forking

[Boris Mann]

On 8-Feb-06, at 10:11 PM, Zack Rosen wrote:

>
> 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

I just don't get it....structure your contracts so you include this  
as part of your pricing, but make it invisible to the customer. ie.  
-- your internal estimate is 50 hours for a module, add 20% for patch/ 
community interaction time, and show external estimate of 60 hours.

You *could* make it very transparent as Zack has suggested, but I  
suspect that this would increase the sales cycle and lead down the  
road of lots more questions.

--
Boris Mann
Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595
SKYPE borismann
http://www.bryght.com

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