As a contractor charge an OSS tax

[jerel]

I'm a contractor and my standard contract states that I have the right to extract any generic code from the client's project. That has worked well but I'm considering adding a "tax" clause that states I can use 20% of the time I bill the client for to contribute to the open source software that is used in the project. The tax amount could obviously be any arbitrary number but 20% would allow 4 days on their project, 1 day polishing the open source software.

My reasoning for this is that I struggle with burnout if I'm not being compensated for the hours that I work on a project doing general maintenance and solving bugs for others.

If a client balks it should be easy to point out that they are profiting immensely from the thousands of hours that went in to initially building the framework and related software. It is easily boosting the project's productivity more than 20%

[lukego]

One formulation would be to first spend 20% of your time contributing to open source projects and then highlight this experience to justify raising your fee by 20%?

[jerel]

That works out mathematically but I personally find it difficult psychologically. There's something about having a paid time tracker running that changes the perspective of cleaning up issues, fixing other peoples' bugs, etc. There's two types of projects for me: a labor of love that's relaxing to work on and a widely used package that has continuous bug reports, grumpy users, etc.

I know shops that tell their clients they only work Monday - Thursday and use Friday for internal things. I guess they're technically using your formula.

[freakboy3742]

@lukego Are you doing this yourself in practice? If so, how do you enforce the 20% time? My experience with 20% time-type programs is that as soon as a deadline looms, or profits get tight, 20% time is the first thing to be eliminated - the practicalities of needing to earn money override the idealism of wanting to contribute to FOSS.

[buddylindsey]

I do know we have a 20% time where I work and while we can take it, lately we haven't because we have a deadline on some technical debt we have to remove or a chunk of the business literally stops being able to do their job. Also a side effect of off shoring for 3 years with little to no guidance. That said if we need to step away for a day we will take 20% even on this crunch.

However, once we get this project done we will go back to 20% time. We generally build it into our sprints to make sure we all get it.