I replied to this earlier this morning, but just as I was previewing my reply, my power cable fell out and I lost it, so here's take 2.
- Should I use a contracted developer who'd leave at project completion, leaving me nobody to maintain the code? Or hire a developer, requiring me to provide long-term work to fill their time?
Either way it's going to cost $$$, decent software developers are valuable.
- How do I motivate a developer to be as dedicated to the project as I am? How can I reward them for their work?
Quite simply, a decent paycheck should provide a decent motivation for any developer, it looks like you want a freelancer so their motivation is going to be getting paid and moving onto their next paycheck.
- I don't know any of the industry best-practices and methods for development which a hired/contract coder may expect to be in place.
Not quite sure what you mean here? Do you mean design paradigms?
- How do I confirm the quality and security of their code?
Unless you're a decent software developer yourself, you can't. You have to trust them. I can make rubbish code look decent and decent code look rubbish.
- How do I secure the code and ideas from being leaked in a "work from home" telecommuting virtual workplace?
You can't, again it's trust, an NDA might give you a 'false' sense of wellbeing though.
- Is there any reason to open source it? I'd like to use existing open source components, but what are the implications (security, stability, etc)?
You have to be very careful on your obligations when using open source code, for example:
BSD has advertising clauses, so you have to say "This product contains portions of..." etc.
LGPL (generally) requires you to dynamically link to the open source components. Any changes you make to the LGPL code must be made public.
GPL (in basic terms) requires you to make available the source code to your product upon request to whoever has obtained the binary from you, that person is then able to freely distribute the sourcecode wherenever they want, they can't however relicense the code under a more restrictive license.
- Is it even profitable to make mobile apps? Android first for quicker return on investment, then iPhone and pray I get into the app store.
If profitability is the aim of the game, I would have thought that aiming to get into the iPhone app store would be the number one aim.
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