I just attended a very interesting session at Drupalcon Paris called Paying for the plumbing. It's a panel involving Allie Micka (Advantage Labs), Angie Byron (Lullabot), Karen Stevenson (Lullabot and recently a freelancer), Tiffany Farriss (Palantir relatively new to Drupal but a long lived company), Eric Gunderson (Development Seed).
Some choice quotes on coordination and business of open source
After some introductions and Allie saying that she didn't want to hear the same old tired platitudes (which was a brilliant start to the session) we got into some discussion with the panel and the audience. Here are a few quotes and paraphrases of what people had to say.
Tiffany Farriss of Palantir gave the perspective that we should
Budget in 10% to every project for "patching."
I assume "patching" means communicating with the module maintainer and re-rolling the patch and making it awesome.
Which is a decent point, we do need to kind of just do this as part of our normal business, but that doesn't pay for the big things nor the "plumbing" but just for incremental improvements.
Further, Tiffany said:
Require all your code to be GPL and tell clients you're going to release it and announce it as best you can.
Which is a great point. Drupal.org requires all code hosted there to be licensed GPL Version 2 and later and if your client claims it isn't then there can be big problems for all involved.
Benjamin from Agaric Design Collective said:
We need better coordination tools.
Which is pretty true, and we have a decent tool at Projects Needing Financing. This points out what I think is the real problem of the whole collaboration idea: coordination.
The only way coordination on a feature works for us is when 2 of our customers want the same thing and we do all the work.
