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What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Sinks?
"Currently if you purchase software, and the software company goes under, all you lose is support, you still have a working product. Consider a large corporation making a major rollout of "rented" (rented meaning any software with a time-limited key) software. If the software company closes its doors, the corporation has now invested thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars into rolling something out that may only work for the rest of the quarter.
On the other hand, consider that you are a company that rents software. If you are required to enable non-terminating keys for the event of corporate liquidation, this would only have to be broken once and one single non-terminating key could get out on the net, thus defeating one of the largest concepts behind "rented" software, anti-piracy (not that I don't whole-heartedly believe that any good software with a rented key won't be cracked with a key patch or something).
Certainly it seems a viable solution to require such companies to give or sell their key distribution duties to another company."
The biggest problem is that you don't always have a real choice in the matter. There are real world cases in which there's a single vendor for a critical piece of software that you desperately need. Even worse, that's likely to become the case more often as software patents become more prevalent, as they give the companies legal monopolies in specific areas. If the company that holds a monopoly on your critical piece of software decides to offer their software only on a rental basis, you have only unappetizing options. You can break the law by writing your own software that violates their patent, rent their software with the odious terms that implies, or do without something that may be critical to your business success. This is the kind of messy decision that happens in the real world of effective monopolies that "free market" appologists choose to ignore when claiming that consumers aren't really stuck.
What do you do when all of your choices are bad? Since the government is fundamentally responsible for this kind of mess by giving away monopolies in the form of software patents shouldn't they be involved in protecting people who wind up being screwed by them?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Should a law be required that if such a company goes under, they must either sell the rights to rent keys to another company, or provide non-terminating keys to the current subscribers?"
Let's call the failed company "FailedCo."
FailedCo "notified" their employees of the company shutdown by changing the lock on their door. (Common practice!) They immediately laid off their entire staff and cancelled their lease on their building. The entire contents of the office, including the computers containing the source code to the software as well as the license key generator -- were loaded up into a truck and piled in a non-climate controlled warehouse, pending Chapter 11 proceedings.
As the case drags through bankruptcy court, more and more customers are faced with license key expiration, which means that they are going to be forced to abandon using the software. This makes the "rights to issue new license keys" less and less valuable over time. When the last license key expires, and the last customer has to abandon their software, the "rights to issue new license keys" falls to a value of zero dollars.
Let's say, for argument's sake, that the judge orders FailedCo to "find a company to continue licensing the software to current customers."
No company in their right mind would agree to do so!
Why? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a company, "ReceiverCo", agrees to do so.
First off, they are being asked to take on the business operations of a failed software company, and pay good money for the privilege!
Second, even though they have the rights to sell license keys and continue to maintain and develop the software, ReceiverCo is first faced with a daunting problem.
The problem is a warehouse filled with computers, huge boxes piled full of cryptically labelled or unlabelled floppy disks, 8mm tapes, and zip disks.
Before they can issue a single license key, they have to figure out:
1) Are all the computers intact? Have the hard drives crashed? Do they boot up? Do they have to be networked together in a certain way in order to work? Are some computers NFS servers? Do they have to be manually restarted when they come up? How much time and money is it going to take to figure this out?
2) Which are the important computers -- the ones with the source code and the license key generator, and which computers are unimportant -- the secretary's computer. The "important" computers are probably protected with unknown passwords. What are the passwords? Are the really important computers protected with encryption? How much money will it cost to hire "hackers" to break into all the machines, and sift through the 80 gig hard drives to find the valuable "assets" -- the source code & license key generator?
3) Was the source code left in a buildable state? Remember, all of the developers are gone, and with no warning. Their computers are probably filled with test builds, undebugged source code, obsolete source code, and probably even entire non-working, experimental build-trees. Parts of the program are in C++, parts are in undocumented assembly language, and the internal build scripts are written in an in-house written scripting language that no one outside of the company has ever seen before. What if FailedCo itself has been licensing code from another company, and that license has run out?
4) How do you run the license key generator? Odds are, it isn't a nice, well-written application. Most likely, it's an obscure command-line program, with a non-obvious, non-documented syntax. How do you even know when you've found the license key generator? Is it that binary called "lkg" in the home directory of an account called "lisa" on any one of 35 identical-looking computers? The "lkg" command just spits out "incorrect syntax" no matter what you type, so how do you know if you've even found the license key generator?
Remember, all of the people who staffed FailedCo are gone. They have new jobs. They've filled their heads with new information for their new job, and barely remember this stuff. And their getting laid off was such a bad experience that they have no interest whatsoever in helping ReceiverCo revive FailedCo's products. Or maybe one of them will do the job -- at an extortionate price.
It could literally take months to years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in manpower to conduct what would amount to an archeological dig through all those computers, and reconstruct the license-key granting program & procedure.
All this to secure an asset of unknown value, that is quickly free-falling towards worthlessness.
No company in their right mind would ever do it.
What will really happen is that FailedCo will fail to find a receiver, and the judge will order that the company's assets be liquidated. All the files and computer media -- floppys, backup tapes -- will be either sent to a landfill or bulk-erased and sold as used media, and the computers will have their hard drives either removed and destroyed, or reformatted, and the computers will be sold as "used computers, without windows", at auction.
And the source code and license key generator will cease to exist.