Kim Jong II (North Korea's Dear Leader) said:Nuclear weapons don't kill people, people kill people.
Originally posted by Matt Horton:
Hey guys, I am preparing to leave the land of money and go to grad school.
I joined a (fixed-bid) project a few years ago. The money was horrendous, 30K, for what has turned out to be a two year project. I originally joined this project in order to own the code, w/ the possibility of distributing the software to other institutions for profit. I overlooked the massive levels of scope-creep, because my manager and I get along relatively well (to a fault, considering he's wasted months of my life) and because as the proprietor of the code, I had to suck it up when the client (who knows his business more than I do) realized there were better workflows.
Now I face a situation where I may be prohibited from receiving funds from elsewhere (nor will I have the time to maintain the software) by receiving a stipend from grad school. So I am in the process of selling the code to the client. I have received some funds from the client up until now (the 30K mentioned above) and we are negotiating the amount it will take for me to turn over the software.
One other issue has entered the fray: a developer that would conceivably support my code has mentioned that he'd like to review my code before he "supports" the decision to purchase it. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
When I lived in the land of salaried employees, I built my career by speaking disparagingly about the skills of the consultants (years ago, I've learned the error of my ways )... so my suspicion makes me wonder if this developer wants to utilize this amount of time to summarize decisions, etc., tug the ear of his employer, and leave me out in the cold.
I also do not know what the legal ramifications are of turning over my code to someone to let them review the code (the image of years in the court w/ the judge remarking "but you gave them the code" haunts me). Also, I did in fact, put myself on the financial line by working on this software as a fixed-bid project. I built the schema. I built the object model. I toiled through the late nights of deciding how to handle the client's complex business flow (or rewriting things when he had a brain-spasm "oh-yeah!"). I just don't know how I feel about this (well, I guess I do as shown above ).