Taking a month off from OSS volunteering
> When the bug didn't get fixed, they personally emailed me asking me to fix it as a consultant within three days. When I said I didn't have the time, they then asked me to do it anyway for free because they still had their own three-day deadline and shouldn't I just want to help them out?<p>I feel like we need a professional ethics code to handle situations like this. To me, if someone is willing to throw money at me to solve a problem, it behooves me to want to help them out. The only consideration here <i>should</i> be, "how much." I would have looked at my current obligations, and quoted them a price at which I would have been willing to drop everything to come up with a patch for.<p>His unwillingness to help them out is, in the eyes of the business world, unprofessional. I get it, we're coders and we do this for fun. But how are we ever going to get the rest of the world to afford us the same respect that doctors and lawyers get if we're unwilling to play ball?<p>If I'm running a business and I need something, I should be able to pay a reasonable amount of money to get it. What's reasonable as determined by a negotiation between me and the party providing it. If I went to him and he was like, I need $10K to do this by Friday, that gives me a baseline. If I balk at the price, but I can get by if I push it to next Tuesday, can I get it for $6K?<p>If he tells me he can't do it at any price, then that means I <i>can't rely on OSS as a pillar of my business</i>.<p>These are the problems I wish Stallman would apply his huge brain to solving. Not saving us from Facebook.