‘Due diligence’ is the business terminology for taking care of details when you enter into a contract. Those details include very basic things like:

• does the seller exist?
• do they have a history of fraud?
• are they on a list of terrorist supporters? (yes, really)…
• are the terms of payment reasonable?
• is it likely that the seller can provide what they claim to be selling?

When you’re looking into buying a whole company, due diligence goes deeper into checking the financial health and operational practices of the business you are buying – and on the other hand, the seller will want to know that you have the money or financing at hand, at the least.

It’s usually a good idea to apply the same sort of discovery or estimation to your own clever ideas, especially if your new plan will involve the expenditure of a significant amount of time or money.

As an example, I was reading a blog post about running a set of repository mirrors for open source projects, when I was struck with the inspiration that I could run my own mirror for the house. This is not immediately completely insane – I/we run mirrors at work for projects that we use. But it did occur to me that I should do some basic due diligence before committing.

A simple pro/con list is a good start:

Given a 5-10x reduction in bandwidth for package updates, and that I don’t pay for bandwidth that way, versus a large increase in disk storage and stuff to maintain, I’ve decided not to bother.