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

[Luggruff]

well, if you had a good contract, then you could just sue him for the running out on you now couldn't you?

[arossphoto]

Originally Posted by Luggruff

well, if you had a good contract, then you could just sue him for the running out on you now couldn't you?

Well, he's in the US and I'm in Canada so even if we had a signed contract a cross-border lawsuit certainly wouldn't be practical. We had extensive corresponce via email before I sent him any money, and that's were he said I would own the code. Also, if I had money to throw away on lawyers I wouldn't be asking for assistance here, I'd just pay someone to finish this for me.

Cheers,

Andrew

[arossphoto]

I guess this wasn't the place to ask, but does anybody have any suggestions for getting this project finished?

[Paul M]

You say it works pretty well - so you could release it as a Beta, asking if anyone wants to work on the bugs / finishing it etc.

[arossphoto]

Originally Posted by Paul M

You say it works pretty well - so you could release it as a Beta, asking if anyone wants to work on the bugs / finishing it etc.

Thanks. I didn't know if it was kosher to do that, because I can't offer any support. I'll think about that and try and get a some screen shots, etc, together.

[arossphoto]

I was just looking over the "read me first" about posting hacks and plugins, and I think I will definitely do this. I don't mind making this script freely available, especially if some people want to help work out the bugs. But is there anything I should do to ensure that someone doesn't take the code and develop it as a paid product?

I see lots of stuff being released for free here, so maybe I'm just being paranoid. But after being ripped off once, I don't want it to happen again.

Cheers,

Andrew