Hi HN,<p>I wrote a moderately popular (800+ stars) open-source project on Github a few years ago. Recently, a startup contacted me because they want some additional features and want to pay me to build them. They are happy to keep all improvements I make as open-source. For me, this is a fantastic opportunity to improve my project for everyone while making a little bit of money.<p>They sent over a contracting agreement that won't work for what they are asking. Basically, it is designed for proprietary contracting work and has clauses referring to the "Assignment of Innovations", etc. To their credit, they themselves suggested that the contract was not good and that I send something over if I had a better one.<p>Well, I've scoured the internet and I can't find anything - but I'm also not a lawyer. What kind of contracts are available for this sort of work? I assume it's been done before.<p>In short, I'm looking for a contract that says something like:<p>1. Consultant will add agreed-upon features to the project<p>2. Company will pay consultant upon completion of features<p>3. Company agrees that the code will remain open-source and retains no ownership<p>4. No warranty is implied
Hello from the GitHub team! It sounds like GitHub Sponsors might be helpful for you here.<p>Companies and individuals can sponsor you for your work, and you can coordinate feature requests or ongoing support right on your repository.<p>Open Source Collective or Open Collective can be helpful in tandem with Sponsors if you don't want to set up your own business bank account or legal status.<p>Sponsors currently supports monthly recurring payments, and we're in the middle of a staged rollout for one-time payments. If that would be helpful for you here, feel free to email me bdresser@github.com and we can get you set up :)
I worked like that for several years. It was perfect.<p>Take their contract and strike out all the wrong terms and conditions. Easier than coming up with your own. Their lawyers are probably completely incompetent. Coming to terms with them would be much easier with just striking out their wrongs. Eg they will certainly not agree on the general "Company agrees that the code will remain open-source and retains no ownership". They paid for so it's their copyright. But under your copyright terms. So they will get their copyright line added, but under a open source license.<p>Second, the here cited sponsor or bounty programs will not work good enough, compared to what the company offers you. Like factor 1000. Unless you got 100.000 stars and over 2.000 sponsors stay with the company offer.
This is one of the times when the value of fiscal sponsorship really shines. For example, if you sign up with Open Source Collective [1] (which I'm on the team of), we can form a contract with the payer and receive the funds, then distribute them to you as the maintainer.<p>We do this kind of thing all the time for projects under our umbrella. We have lawyers on tap and lots of experience in this area, and we take on all the responsibility for tax reporting, legals, compliance, banking, invoicing etc etc.<p>If your project has >100 stars you can set up a Collective instantly.<p>[1] <a href="https://oscollective.org" rel="nofollow">https://oscollective.org</a>
When working on open source drivers for their chips Qualcomm solved that by internally moving employees to use Code Aurora [1], the employees used different emails when working with open source code<p>[1] <a href="https://www.codeaurora.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.codeaurora.org/</a>
I can vouch for and.co, you as the contractor can crate a customized contracts which addresses most of your concerns. You can also add extra clauses just in case. If all parties are acting in good faith then the amendments/additions on the generated contract shouldn't need to be run through a lawyer
I doubt the company will throw money to someone to write the code without any hint of residual rights.<p>Even if they're open source religious - still they want at least their name probably listed along the lines as a creators