Tag Archives: Openismus

Openismus GmbH on the way

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I finally instructed my accountant to set up Openismus GmbH which will probably take a few weeks. It feels slightly scary, but I want to give it a try. Got to build to grow.

I already have a first part-time employee – Johannes Schmid of Anjuta fame. I was very sad to reply to all the other people who answered my call for a mini-job, but maybe I can use some of them if I get enough work.

A GmbH is a German form of limited company, and is one of the few forms of company that is taken seriously. It’s not actually necessary in Germany, unlike the U.K. which demands that freelancers create one-man Ltd companies that employ them(selves). It’s also much more difficult and expensive than in the U.K. There’s an extra tax that you have to pay, plus additional administration. But it’s generally simpler when dealing with international companies, so I can consider it as marketing, and it will be better for employing people.

I should probably improve the web site too. Sooner or later I’ll have to accept that there’s no sane way to make attractive web sites without hacks. Yes, I mean round corners.

Security versus satisfaction

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I had an interesting interview today for a contract in Munich, involving embedded Linux and VoIP. That’s good technology to work with, but the project is likely to be otherwise quite conservative. It would offer reliable income for a few months without being away from home.

The downside is that I’ve been thinking again about starting a company, because I’m seeing increasing demand for open source consulting, particularly with embedded GTK+/gtkmm. And I believe that Glom consulting can be a winner in the next few years. I think demand will increase more if I can offer a corporate partner with a pool of employees. One of my problems at the moment is that there aren’t currently many good employee candidates in Germany. Many of the best German GNOME developers have been snapped up by other companies, and most of the others that I strongly admire are still students so I’d feel bad about tempting them away.. Some people have already received emails asking if they’d be interested if I manage to find enough business to support them, just in case. I would really want my Openismus company to mentor new developers, but I think I need some dependable people to start with.

Maybe this will work out, but I guess I’ll get an offer about this contract in the next couple of days, so I may have to decide whether or not to risk seeing if things work out. A company, with sizable contracts, would insulate me from having to make these decisions every now and then.

Openismus

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As I mentioned a while ago, I wanted to have some kind of company name to put on my freelancing work, so that it could become known, and so that I could build it over the years. I finally thought of a name, though I’m not ready to found a full company yet. I have moved various articles from murrayc.com to the new website.

Openismus is not yet a proper company. In terms of German law, it is an Existenz, no different than how I worked before. If all goes well then it might become a Firma next year. Compared to the UK, it’s quite difficult to found a company in Germany, though it is far easier to work without a company.

I spent an insane amount of time creating that simple web site with CSS. I needed a couple of hacks to make it work on Mozilla, and a couple of even stranger ones on Windows. Every time I thought I had fixed it, I would try it on the other platform and find that either the position, height, or width of a box had gone loony. I am really starting to think that CSS positioning is a waste of time unless you want fixed positions. I don’t know if the problem is the CSS specification, but it’s obvious that no browsers seem capable of implementing the specification, and they are all broken in different ways.