Freelancing and Open Source

The Independent
Software Developer
Peat Bakke
peat@i26r.com
@peat

http://i26r.com/

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Orientation

• Introductions!
• Freelancing and Open Source
• Marketing and Sales
• The Bottom Line


Who am I, and what
the heck am I doing
here?


Who are you?


Employment vs
Freelancing

• Employee: employer owns copyrights and
inventions, even during “down time” and
outside of the work place.
• Freelancer: you explicitly control the
boundaries of what your clients own.


Employment vs
Freelancing
• Employee: limited free time outside of
employment activities to contribute to
open source projects.
• Freelancer: optimize contracts and
schedule to provide time and resources for
open source hacking.


What is a Freelancer?

• You are offering your talent for solving a
particular type of problem to lots of
people ... in exchange for money.
• You are responsible for how your software
gets built, and for the quality of your work.


Freelancing Pros
• Flexible Schedule
• Flexible Location
• Flexible Projects
• Flexible Flexibile Flexible Flexible Flexible
• “Flexible” starts to look and sound a bit
funny, doesn’t it?


Freelancing Cons
• rot13(“VEF”)
• No guaranteed income.
• Distinct lack of cultural appreciation for
misanthropic behavior.
• Most clients don’t “get” the open source
world.


Separation of Concerns

• Concerns about money are satisﬁed by
landing contracts with clients.
• Concerns about open source are satisﬁed
by building time into your schedule to
contribute to open source.


Legal Entanglements

• Most contracts are “work for hire.”
• Contract should speciﬁcally say that you
will disclose all pre-existing licenses.
• The (L)GPL discussion will be exciting. Get
it out of the way up front.


The (L)GPL Argument
• You don’t pay for the software, unlike
Windows, Oracle, Photoshop, etc.
• You can ﬁx fundamental problems yourself,
unlike Windows, Oracle, Photoshop, etc.
• The easy trade for getting amazing free
tools that are user serviceable: if you ﬁx
something, you give it back to everyone
else.


Dirty Words

• Marketing: understanding who wants what.
• Selling: turning someone into a client.
• Marketing + Selling = LARPing in a suit.


Showing Up
is Half the
Battle

Marketing
• Who’s using your technology? Go to user
groups and mailing lists to ﬁnd out.
• Are they hiring freelancers? Just ask.
• Can they pay enough to make it worth
your while? Just ask.
• No? Can you try another technology?


Selling

• Communicate at the person’s level
• Establish that you are trustworthy
• Engage with their goals and interests
• Show that you can help them
• Give them an easy choice


Communicating on
Their Level
• Reﬂection
• Reinforcement


UPLEVEL
INTERDEPARTMENT
SYNERGY!!!


SCALABLE RESTFUL
WEB SERVICES!!!


Reinforce Their Goals

• I’d love to hear more about ...
• Is this a good example of ... ?
• What can I do to make this kick ass?
• Can you tell me more about your business?


EstablishTrust

• Offer a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
• Bring one to your ﬁrst meeting.
• Take (light) notes during the meeting.


Establish Interest

• Take people out for coffee, and pay for it.
• After each conversation, take ﬁve minutes
to search Google for related information.
• Explicitly say you’re interested, and ask
about “next steps”


Show Them You Can Help
• Ideal situation: show off a previous client
who you solved the same sorts of
problems for, step your prospect through
the solution.
• Backup situation: work through a problem
by asking questions, offering solutions, and
responding positively to mistakes.


Make It An Easy Choice

• You’ve established that you’re interested,
talented, and motivated.
• Time and money are the hard limits for a
project: give them a timeline and cost.


Finding Your Rate
• You are the seller: you need to make sure
your costs are covered to ensure that you
are able to do the things you want to do.
• Client is the buyer: they have speciﬁc
problems to solve, with an interest in doing
it as effectively as possible within their
budget and timeline.


Cost Based Rate
Income x (1 + Tax Rate) / Billing Ratio / Working Hours

• Income
• Tax Rate
• Billing Ratio
• Working Hours

Cost Based Rate
$50,000 x (1 + 0.3) / 0.7 / 1500 = $61.90 per hour

• Income
• Tax Rate
• Billing Ratio
• Working Hours

Gut Check Estimates
• Establishes timeline, and it’s a communication
tool for sorting out features.
• Consider: understanding, planning, coding,
releasing, supporting.
• Gut number is the low end.
• Conﬁdence as 0.1 (extremely low) to 1.0
(extraordinarily easy).
• Low / Conﬁdence = High

The Easy Choice
• Clients need a project completed by a certain
date, within a certain amount of money.
• Convert time estimates to weeks or iterations
to get a delivery date. Hours are a difﬁcult unit
to negotiate over.
• Multiply high estimate by cost based rate to get
the price of the contract.
• Negotiate on conﬁdence score.

Recap
• Freelancing gives you more power over
intellectual property and time management.
• Think about marketing and sales in
roleplaying terms.
• Understand how much you need to make.
• Negotiate on your “conﬁdence” basis.
• Showing up is half the battle!

Thank you!

Peat Bakke
peat@i26r.com
@peat

http://i26r.com/


Freelancing and Open Source

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