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FLORA Community Consulting: RATES

I have different rates depending on the type of work I am doing, and have special discounts for specific politically active and similar organizations. Here are the sample rates as of January 2006.

Customer type	Type of Work	Description	Rate per day
NGO/Activist Discount	System administration Internet Services Projects	Includes the NGO community, social services agencies, advocacy groups, public awareness organizations, progressive political parties. Only applies to Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) work, and qualifying organizations doing work compatible with the values promoted by FLORA.ca	$450/day
For-Profit/Government	System administration, Internet Services	Ongoing services such as domain name/email/website maintenance and maintenance of LAN servers.	$600/day
For-Profit/Government	projects (offsite)	Projects would include the configuration of a server, the development of a tool, or the maintenance of existing software.	$700/day
For-Profit/Government	projects (onsite, Ottawa Region)	Projects that include the additional costs of transportation and lack of access to local development environment.	$800/day

Notes:

Basic rates: (Invoice Sample)
- While I no longer offer commercial hosting on equipment I own, I do offer system administration for servers that are co-located elsewhere (See: CooperIX , Open Concept). To simplify paperwork I offer basic administration for a basic fee (Often a half or full day each quarter), with larger projects being above this.
- Internet services with the addition of LAN services (File/Print sharing, LAN based Email, shared Internet connectivity) would be based on 1 day per month.
non-Free/Libre and Open Source Software surcharge
There is a surcharge of $100/day for development, maintenance or configuration of non-Free/Libre Software. This is because code and information sharing between projects, source code viewing for advanced problem solving and distributed testing/development is not possible.

Some exceptions exist:
- Organizations that are in the process of migrating to an Free Software environment would not be temporarily charged the non-Free/Libre Software surcharge.
- Existing organizations using MS-Windows 3.x or MS-Windows 9x on the desktop, and need an Open-Systems based server will be eligible for regular rates for maintaining of basic LAN services (Internet connectivity, sharing disk/printers), but not for applications support. This exception is based on the hope that future upgrades from these older platforms might be to Free Software based platforms.
- non-Free/Libre products where the software is in transition to Free Software will be supported at the regular rates. Current examples include Netscape Communicator (based on Mozilla) and Sun StarOffice (based on OpenOffice).
Customers using MS-Windows NT/2000/XP or other non-Free/Libre platforms, or need more than basic connectivity support on the desktop would need to pay the non-Free/Libre rates for support of those machines. Support for non-Free/Libre software is subject to availability.

Customers otherwise eligible for non-profit rates who add non-Free/Libre software to Free Software platforms (IE: non-Free/Libre Software to a Linux server) may also be ineligible for non-profit rates for support of those servers.
Non-support for waived FLOSS rights
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) offers specific rights to both users of software and suppliers of software services. It has come to my attention that some customers may be considering signing waivers for these rights such that they may have imported FLOSS software into their company but no longer have the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

If you are in this situation, please clarify it with me if you wish me to offer support for your software.

As an example, I do not offer support for customers who have waived their FLOSS rights by agreeing to the runtime binary-only license from The SCO Group. This form of licensing has all the practical problems of trying to support other non-FLOSS software, with the added bonus of being support for products from a company that is actively seeking to harm the entire sector of the economy my business exists in. Rather than offer support with the non-FLOSS software surcharge it has been decided that in the case of waived FLOSS rights that we will not offer support at all.

Get Legal - become Free!

In March 2002 I participated in a campaign: Get Legal - become Free!. On March 1, 2004 this campaign expanded to the "Make it legal: don't litigate, use creative licensing" campaign.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Canada License.

Last update: $Date: 2011/05/09 14:25:08 $ UTC