I decided a few weeks ago I wanted to see what the environment for local software development might look like if I sent an old fashioned letter directly to a bunch of businesses in my community. Yesterday I sent out the letters so I'll soon be finding out what sort of response I'm going to receive. Assuming I get a few responses, I wanted to see if anyone that already does software development for other businesses would be willing to share examples of the contracts that they use (preferably) or ways to structure things so I don't sell myself short. One of the things I'll be gauging over these next few weeks (and talking with the businesses and building some nice software for them) is to see if any of these projects have some more general commercial opportunity so within the contracts I'd like to retain any ownership of the software and not grant the rights over to the company I'd be working with (this might be assumed, but I'm not sure if it has to be written into the contract explicitly). I've read in past threads that I should charge at least $100/hr or try and schedule things in blocks (day/week) so additional details on the best way to do that would be great (I have a day job, so I don't have unlimited free time, scheduling things out in longer blocks probably wouldn't work too well in my case, but may still be an option I can use some of the time). I'm sure I could use Google and find a decent example contract I could put to use but this seemed like a good topic that would generate a fair amount of discussion and I'd be happy to hear the community's advice on this one ;-). Thanks!