Just because you're working in the open source world doesn't mean you should skimp on contracts with contractors and developers, Gill cautions. 'Unfortunately, people often have relationships and bring developers in to do development work without properly documenting it. In any decent development contract, you should specify the deliverables, and the specifications and functionality required.

'I have come across cases where the customer has just given the outline of what they want in broad terms, and then it's very difficult if they don't get what they like and there's no specification to tie it back to. But you get good and bad developers everywhere ' this isn't a problem unique to open source software.'

As if to underscore this, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (a company that specializes in digital certificates and internet privacy), as well as the Ubuntu project, which promises 'a free, high-quality desktop OS for everybody', has blogged about his bad experiences with open source development.

Shuttleworth found that paying geeks to write code without assigning them managers resulted in 'shiny geek toys', rather than the product he thought he was paying for.

But if your developer leaves you in the lurch for a better paying project, moves overseas or just goes bust, none of this should be as problematical as it would be if your developer was from a closed source software house, because you will already have the source code; in contrast to proprietary software arrangements, where you normally wouldn't hold the source code unless you had an escrow agreement with the vendor.