Please do not ask me to earn your wages for you

Another rant about Open Source development

I would like all my readers and especially the tens of thousands of people who have downloaded my Wordpress Plugins to please remember the following >> I am currently giving my plugins away for free and relying on Google adsense clicks and donations to help fund my development time.

So far I have had a few £60 payments from Google and a minimal amount of donations. I have welcomed every donation so far so please don't think they are not appreciated but when you usually work for £700 a day having a donation for £1 or £2 once a fortnight which relates to about 3,000 downloads is a bit disheartening.

I know I have blogged about how much I hate open source coding before but I am honestly of the opinion that a number of UK and US companies are outsourcing high quality IT developer jobs to India (because it seems you can find a developer willing to write whole websites for less than a £50 somewhere on that sub-continent) only for those same developers to fill up my inbox or comment sections with requests for me to do their work for them for free.

In fact probability suggests that I have more than likely ended up doing some Indians work for them for free who stole the original contract from myself due to undercutting my reasonable and realistic quote for a £10!

It would be quite funny if not so sad and unfortunate but it seems that too many IT managers and company directors have no idea about the value of a qualified and experienced IT developer nowadays and it's only through their incessant cost cutting that they will learn the hard way.

It is also for this reason that I am going to refuse to do any custom development for any of my plugins unless partial payment is received up front.

On numerous occasions, and sadly this even includes multi-national companies, I have had people contact me and promise reasonable sized donations for specific features to be developed only for them to swerve me once the work has been done.

Due to the GPL nature of Wordpress there is little scope for money making unless you do most of your work with remote procedure calls or mask your code some way which unlike C# and .NET is pretty hard with PHP as you cannot easily convert your code to a compiled DLL or equivalent compiled file type.

Therefore if you have any requirements or ideas for improvements to my plugins you may email me with your request but please don't expect a reply unless you are willing to pay for the work up front. I am a reasonable man and will accept half up front and half on completion but I have lost faith in mankind to keep their word and there are way too many shysters for my liking.

Either steal my code without me knowing about it or pay me for it.

DO NOT ask to steal my code it makes no fucking sense at all! (this has actually happened)

If you cannot code and are incapable of amending or making your own plugins like I had to do or you are too stupid to steal code without being caught then be a real man and ask the developer what price they will accept.

Do not promise them a tenner for a grands worth of work and do not get annoyed when you ask if your specific feature is something I am thinking of introducing in a future release and I reply "not unless someone pays me to do it".

I have long passed the time in my life where I code other peoples work for fun just so that they can earn money off my hard labour.

My rant is officially over. Thank you for listening.