NewsForge: Paying Developers to Get Features Faster

“What do you do when your off-the-shelf software lacks all the
features you want? If it’s Open Source software, you can modify the
program yourself, if you’ve got the time and expertise, but then
you have to worry about supporting your mods, and whether they’ll
work when a new release comes out. You can ask the program’s
developers and hope they’ll do what you request within a useful
time frame. Or–in some cases–you can pay the developers to add
the features you want, in the timeframe you want, as part of the
main release.

“For example, Legal Aid Manitoba relies on a program called
Childview, which it had been running under Windows 98. Faced with
the need to continue supporting its 150 employees in seven offices
on an annual budget of CA$333 per user, the organization looked at
migrating to Linux as an alternative to a much more costly hardware
and software upgrade to Windows XP…”

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