Programmer screwed me - how can I complete project?

[arossphoto]

Hi,

I'm looking for some advice and feedback on how to proceed with a custom project that I paid a programmer almost $1000 for, but that has been left unfinished with a few small bugs. The programmer has taken my money and no longer answers my emails, but in my correspondence with him he agreed in writing that I own the code and he has no rights to it.

The basic product actually works pretty well, and I would really like to see it get finished and perhaps improved upon, but I can't afford to spend any more money on this.

So I was thinking maybe I could release this product freely to the vB community if some talented programmer with a bit of heart and some free time was interested in taking this project on and working with me to make it freely available.

I can provide more info if anyone is interested, but this is basically a member portfolio system that will allow paying members to upload photographs to a portfolio. That might not sound so special, but what makes this system unique is that it is searchable by member location and speciality. For example if someone is searching for a food photographer in Toronto, they can search our member database and find those members who meet that criteria and view their portfolio. I looked every where for an existing solution that would do the same thing, but there really is nothing like it available anywhere.

I think this could be useful for lots of other applications and it can also be divided into categories and sub-categories, and I can limit image uploads based on member group.

Is anybody interested or does anyone have any advice at all on how to proceed with this? I really don't want to get taken advantage of again, so any feedback at all would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew