I have a business idea. Can I hire someone on the dev team to do consultancy work or development regarding MakeHuman?
The question about consulting is one that keeps popping up. Unfortunately the answer we keep giving regarding commercial proposals is this:
The MakeHuman project is a volunteer effort with no commercial aspects. The project doesn’t even have a budget. The developer team consist solely of people who have full time jobs, making it difficult to take on more work.
Our best suggestion at this time is to present the idea on the forums and ask for feedback, and maybe see if a forum user might be interested in joining in on the effort.
We will of course answer any questions to the best of our abilities there.
This is not a reflection on your business idea (whatever it might be), nor that we’re hostile against commercial projects surrounding MakeHuman. The practical circumstances just prevent us from engaging in such projects.
This said, there are also legal reasons for why paying someone to do development work based on MakeHuman code might be tricky. As MakeHuman is licensed AGPL, all code linked to it or derived from it will also become AGPL. This is likely to be in contradiction to paid development, where the one paying for the code would have a reasonable interest in keeping that code to themselves. This might not be entirely impossible to work with, but it is still a hurdle that will make a commercial project difficult to navigate in.