{"id":1185,"date":"2009-09-14T23:02:35","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T21:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2016-09-14T13:20:17","modified_gmt":"2016-09-14T11:20:17","slug":"how-much-for-a-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/2009\/09\/14\/how-much-for-a-bug\/","title":{"rendered":"How much for a bug?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"noWarning: blog post with no clear conclusion! <\/strong><\/p>\n

I offer support deals to companies that want to get help with Open Source programs I’ve contributed to. The deals I’ve made so far have primarily involved libcurl<\/a>, c-ares<\/a> or libssh2<\/a>, but that’s basically because those are projects in which I participate a lot in (and maintain) so people find me easily in relation to those projects.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t mind accepting service and support deals for other projects or software products either, as long as they are products I know and am fairly familiar with already and I am not scared of digging in and fixing things under the hood when that is required.<\/p>\n

In fact, I could very well consider to offer to fix bugs in any <\/em>Open Source software<\/strong>. Like a general: if you have a bug in an open source project that you really want fixed and you can’t do it yourself I might be your man. Of course this would be limited to some certain kinds of projects and programs, but it could still include a wide range of software. A lot more than the ones I happen to be involved in at any particular point in time.<\/p>\n

But while “a bug” is a fairly easily defined term to a user who can’t make something work in a given program it can be anything from dead simple to downright impossible for a developer to fix. The fact that users many times cannot determine if a “bug” is hard or easy, if it’s a bug or a feature not working on purpose, makes such a business deal very hard to provide.<\/p>\n

How to pay to get a bug fixed?<\/h2>\n

Fixed price per bug? Presumably only tricky bugs would be considered for this so it would require a fairly high fixed price. But then it’ll also never be used for simple bugs either since the fixed price would scare away such use cases. I don’t think a fixed-price scheme works very well for this.\"One<\/p>\n

Then we only have a variable price approach left. A common way for a consultant like me is to charge for my time spent on a project: I set an hourly rate, I fix the issue in N hours. I charge hourly rate * N. For smallish projects, this is less attractive to customers. If we have no previous relationship, there’s a trust issue where the customer might not just blindly accept that I worked 10 hours on a task they think sounds easy so they feel overcharged. Also, there’s the risk that I estimate the job to be 2 hours but end up spending 12. My conclusion is that per-hour pricing doesn’t work for this either.<\/p>\n

A variable price approach based on something else than number of hours it took for me to fix the problem is therefore needed.<\/p>\n

A bug fix is of course worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But we don’t know what they are prepared to pay. On the other end, a bug fix can get done by someone for the price he\/she is willing to accept to get the job done. So where is the cross section of those two unknown graphs?<\/p>\n

I don’t have the answer here. I’m very interested in feedback and suggestions though. If you would pay for a bug fix, how would you like to get the price set?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warning: blog post with no clear conclusion! I offer support deals to companies that want to get help with Open Source programs I’ve contributed to. The deals I’ve made so far have primarily involved libcurl, c-ares or libssh2, but that’s basically because those are projects in which I participate a lot in (and maintain) so … Continue reading How much for a bug?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,6],"tags":[213,33,419,424,19],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curl","category-development","category-floss","tag-c-ares","tag-curl-and-libcurl","tag-development","tag-libssh2","tag-open-source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9300,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions\/9300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.haxx.se\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}