Ask HN: A company wants to pay me to write open-source code
5 by scottrogowski | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, 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. 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. 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. In short, I'm looking for a contract that says something like: 1. Consultant will add agreed-upon features to the project 2. Company will pay consultant upon completion of features 3. Company agrees that the code will remain open-source and retains no ownership 4. No warranty is implied