Symphony.

It’s Friday, so bare with me.

What is stopping me from producing 10 XHTML templates that are almost identical apart from slight changes. So is it fair that I charge for each template? Even though they are all the same apart from the odd change? My development time wasn’t multiplied by 10. Do I need to be funded 10 times?

I just don’t think you can put a figure on funding development.

What is stopping me from producing 10 XHTML templates that are almost identical apart from slight changes. So is it fair that I charge for each template? Even though they are all the same apart from the odd change? My development time wasn’t multiplied by 10. Do I need to be funded 10 times?

I would say “yes.”

You don’t get paid just for the work you do. You also get paid for your experience. You invested the time to create the original template. You tested it, modified it and made it modular so you could make 10 other variations. That last template was quick to make, but you would not have been able to create such a thing without the first.

Experience is the valuable part.

@NickType:

The entire digital industry disagrees with you; you certainly can put a figure on funding development. And to answer your question regarding the templates, yes, why not? At the end of the day it’s the market (/the wider Symphony community) that will decide. If I see value in one or more of your templates - or indeed if I can generate value from one or more of your templates - why would you deny me the possibility of recognising your work financially?

A working example: we needed a tool for the automation of pushing media files to Amazon’s Cloudfront. One existed but didn’t do exactly what we needed it to (s3cmd). So I made a change request and when it was delivered made a series of donations back to the project. Why? Because they solved a problem for me and I wanted to recognise that.

I don’t have the time to contribute to the project directly (if I did I could have made the updates myself) and providing financial incentive achieves the same goal. Hence the donation.

As to your earlier point about ownership, I would simply bat it back to you - why do you want/need ownership? In the example given above, I have no means of commercialising the update and even if I did, no inclination to do so (as it’s a crowded space and the technology is comparatively low level). Being able to drive the direction of the project is ownership enough.

I don’t agree at all. Now this is a weird analogy, but trying to see if I can get it across.

Someone makes a Pizza, Margarita. It’s perfection, this guy has spent his life studying the perfect ingredients, the best sauce, the best mozzarella.

He charges what? By experience? or by profit margin and what the consumer would pay? Well it’s the latter. So say he charges £7.00.

Now he has created an Hawaii Pizza. Exactly the same ingredients, apart from he has added Pineapple and Ham. How does he charge? By experience? Does he charge double for what he charged for the Margarita? Why not?

Because it’s not right. All he has done is added an extra two toppings. The rest is the same. So he charges for those two toppings. £9.00

Do we go into McDonalds and pay more for a burger to be cooked by someone with more stars on their badge?

Nope.

How is it different? It’s not.

So why should web development be the same? Also how do you measure experience. Why is that guy charging £10 more an hour? oh because he got an award as a php expert in Sitepoint. Well did that guy over there, no - he’s never been on Sitepoint. Oh. How much then?

You earn what people will pay, and I doubt people would want to pay double for what is pretty much the same job.

The entire digital industry disagrees with you;

Slight generalisation there.

If you went to a client and said it’s going to cost extra because although the work is just me updating something I had already built, I want to charge you full price plus the extra bit.

I’m talking about people out there who don’t deal in this industry and by in large are afraid to commit to it, financially.

This is not me pulling this out of the sky, this is real life business. I negotiate daily on how to get the best deal for myself, but clients want to see what they are paying for.

Your point was “I just don’t think you can put a figure on funding development”. This is plainly false. And the fact that you make a living out of digital only confirms this.

It confirms nothing.

If you put a job out on say oDesk, for someone to create something for you - you would get back some pretty wide ranging quotes.

I stand by my opinion and have yet to be convinced. I also don’t understand what you mean that because I work in the industry that confirms things.

I have done pretty much the same work for different clients with different levels of prestige. Whereas I can get a couple of grand of one client, I may only get half that from another.

I have a rate, and I also have a maximum and minimum costs in mind for certain jobs. But you have the likes of Andy Clark who recommends you pick one day a month and double your rate for that day.

I truly think you only get what the person is willing to pay. There are negotiations, there are discounts, there are variables that can factor in a different price.

Just for the record I’m not saying that you can’t price up funding of a development, I just don’t think you can measure it so.

Or think of it like this, if you are selling Symphony for say £50. And then you develop it further with 2.0.1 - do you charge people £50 again? Or £10?

I really don’t want to argue though. It’s all about opinions.

I just feel that it would not be easy to price up funding for something. A commercial license fee though would benefit the developers, but then if more than one person is working on it, it could get confusing on how much each person would get.

I don’t know then.

Because it’s not right. All he has done is added an extra two toppings. The rest is the same. So he charges for those two toppings. £9.00

Would you go into a Michelin-starred restaurant and pay £9 for a pizza? No. You pay the experience and quality of the chef. The end price isn’t dictated by the cost of the ingredients, it’s dictated by the cost of ingredients plus your own markup.

Actually, price is dictated by what the market is willing to pay.

Would you go into a Michelin-starred restaurant and pay £9 for a pizza? No. You pay the experience and quality of the chef. The end price isn’t dictated by the cost of the ingredients, it’s dictated by the cost of ingredients plus your own markup.

Yes but they don’t charge £7 for the marg pizza and then £9 for the marg pizza plus 2 extra toppings. £16 in total. That was what I was saying.

Actually, price is dictated by what the market is willing to pay.

Exactly

Yes but they don’t charge £7 for the marg pizza and then £9 for the marg pizza plus 2 extra toppings. £16 in total.

You’ve totally lost me.

Nick,

An interesting article pertaining to this topic (I think I got this from MrBlank on twitter). And yes, ditto on the ‘What the market will bear’. That’s the bottom line, literally.

Does that make sense?

I’m afraid it doesn’t make sense to me.

whoever pays for the license owns it, and can do what they like with it commercially.

That depending on the type of license, many of them forbid you to toy with the code – they simply grant you the right to use it. In this sense, commercial licenses are incredibly restrictive.

License cost is relative to the amount of “ownership” you have. For example, if a company asks us to develop an extension but they want to own it whole, the cost would be much higher than if they want us to develop something that will go under an open source license. Effectively, this is a difference between paying for IP v.s. paying for time. By the way, how your are using the word “licensing” is probably better phrased as transfer of ownership or intellectual property rights. Licensing implies the developer still owns the code.

I would not want to fund something that is going to be available for free, because there is no knowing at what stage they are at in the development.

We have not had any agency raise a ruckus about the potential of paying for half-developed or even fully developed code. Here are some reasons why:

1. If you are a client and you need something, whether or not the developer already made it – doesn’t change the fact that you still need it.
2. You need to trust the developer. If the developer isn’t doing the ethical thing by their clients, then don’t use them again.
3. As a developer, if a client is incredibly sensitive about getting screwed, they’re not the right kind of person to be funding the project.

With most clients we’ve dealt with, all of them have been happy to go the open source route, because:

1. It’s much cheaper than buying the rights to the code
2. As open source code, they can do whatever the hell they want with it (just like owning it)
3. Benefit from improvements that people make to it
4. Get recognition (we attribute credit to people/companies who helped fund extensions)
5. No script code is ever valuable enough to own out-right. If it takes 5 hours to make, what’s stopping someone else making something similar but with 2 extra hours of awesome attached?

Bit late in the game with my post above, I had it half written in the text area and left to have supper. By the time I got back heaps of stuff came after.

Joseph made the point very clear:

Actually, price is dictated by what the market is willing to pay.

I don’t think you fully understand the impact of that statement.

You can charge $3000 for a pizza if you want. No one will stop you from doing so. Whether someone will buy it is an entirely different story.

I just feel that it would not be easy to price up funding for something.

It’s easy! Price it to what you feel is fair and see if the client agrees. If not, then decline the work or change your price.

Your views in this industry feels incredibly jaded. Not every client out there is out to scrutinise on every penny, some actually care more about results!

@Allen: these are all very valid points and I can only back them up with our own experience. As an agency we’re 100% Open Source, meaning that we explicitly write the right to Open Source all of our work into our contracts. To date none of our clients have objected to this. And we work with everyone, from the biggest brands to county councils to corporate monoliths.

Sorry, I’m obviously being ganged up on. Maybe I have lower intellect than such developers - but it’s clear that your not understanding what I am saying, so i’ll just leave it.

Good idea?

@nick Discourse is boring without a dissenting opinion, so don’t feel bad. I think you produced an interesting thread!

What can you do?

It’s probably best that I leave it, I’m obviously the odd one out.

I’m not sure it’s a case of being ganged up on Nick, rather a case of your view point being in the minority. If you want to keep discussing it, keep discussing it :)