 Outsourcing Development Project
I have a large development project that I am considering outsourcing. I have never outsourced a job of this size before, and am a little concerned on a few points:
1. Has anyone had good/bad experience with eLance for farming large development projects -- i.e., 40-80 hours of solid coding?
2. The final project will be a VERY profitable product, and we would want to be able to ensure that the code does NOT slip into anyone else's hands. While a solid contract would protect us in the case of domestic developers, an overseas developer would be able to sell this product 10 times before we could even detect it, and litigation could take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars (if it were feasible at all). Has anyone ever had legal issues of this kind, and can offer any input to ensure outsourced code is kept secure?
3. Since the logic for this project is fairly linear (part a -> part b -> part c) I am considering splitting the project into two or three chunks and outsourcing different parts to different developers. While this increases the amount of communication throughout the project (only slightly) and may make debugging slightly more difficult, it will reduce our risk based on #2 above. Any thoughts on this idea?
The project itself will require extensive knowledge of PHP, mySQL. The key skill, though, will be the ability to use a PHP script to emulate a user websession to another (foreign) webservers -- including direct socket connections, headers (i.e., cookie management, SSL, POSTing variables, etc) and authentication. While there will need to be a small admin, most code will run silently on the server (i.e., pseudo-cron jobs, or push/pull transactions between deployed instances of the application). I want to use these common technology so the application can be deployed quickly and easily on hosted webservers. If anyone knows of an honest developer who may be able to carry the weight of part or all of this project, please PM me for more info. | 
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