It is possible that for some reason or other you will pick up an almost complete project for debugging or last minute work that has only swfs to work with. Please be careful and use your judgement wisely. A lot of freelancers (including me) don’t send their source to the client until final payment is received for protection. We all like to get paid for our work; and I know there are very few who have been in the business for more than a few months who can say they have been paid in entirety for every contract they have signed. Money disputes happen; picking up someone’s work before such a dispute is solved means there’s a very likely chance that person will get screwed over (and you too).

This happened to me just this morning, when I was offered to pick up one of Arckid’s projects. I’m not aware of the details of the situation, but I’m sure you’ll understand that precaution was advisable and that I was not torn by my decision of refusing the project.

In a related subject, please don’t be a cheapstake; buy a license of the shareware apps you’re using. Some have argued that when they were starting out, this or that suite of web-related software (pick one) was too expensive. Fair enough. But I bet that many of you have cheap cracked software on their computers; we’re talking less than 200$ software, like UltraEdit, Opera, WS_FTP, Sorenson Pro, decompilers (pick one), whatever. Buy it. If you don’t want to pay for it, charge the client for it. It’s that simple. Same goes for components and fonts. I really don’t think that Macromedia gives a flying fudge that a 15 year old kid runs a cracked version of Flash to make a website for his friend’s garage band; but I bet Burak is pissed when he sees ASViewer on eMule.

That’s enough moralizing for today ;)