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Developers Lose With Proprietary Software
An anonymous reader writes "Appgen looked like a nice cross-platform accounting program independent software developers could use as a base for custom applications, and lots of them paid $2000 or more for the company's development kits. Then Appgen went out of business and left all those developers stranded. They can't even generate license keys, and their support has disappeared. Nobody knows who now owns Appgen's code, so it looks like all those developers and their clients are screwed. This couldn't happen if Appgen was Open Source. There's a strong lesson in this story for those who choose to listen." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
Don't be a Sharecropper.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
For those looking for insight on this might look here:
http://www.aaxnet.com/product/appgn.html
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10-Oct-03 - the Appgen company has closed - the Appgen product is expected to continue. There are groups currently working on acquiring rights to license the product and this issue should be resolved soon. Nothing is yet resolved about terms, pricing or VAR support.
18-Oct-03 - people are still working to put together a deal, but the process has apparently been stalled a bit by the volume of badmouthing and threats (legal and physical) against those who were involved with the Appgen company. Cooperation would seem to be a much better tactic right now.
You may contact me by email at aax@aaxnet.com and I will keep you updated on whatever I learn about this matter.- or just watch this space
For people with licensing problems with Mybooks purchased directly from Appgen, this temporary solution has been proposed by an Appgen VAR.
continued...
Never agree to a source code escrow agreement that doesn't call for periodically audits of the escrow. If you don't audit the escrow, don't depend on it really existing.
It's just like doing backups - if you never test your backup, it won;t work when you need it.
Hindsight is 20/20. Given the apparent vigor of AppGen, I'm sure that the VARs weren't concerned that this would happen. Only experience teaches you that appearances can be deceiving.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Look, I am in personal agreement with the author's basic point: there are a lot of advantages to open source for software users. But there are solutions to this problem in the propriatary world too, and propriatary methods cannot be condemned under the theory that there are no such methods.
sPh
Lol, I'd be willing to bet if Sun went under there would be some major difficulties in the industry.
How much money are you willing to lose on that bet?
There are plenty of free or open source and third party sources for Java compilers, JVMs, bytecode compilers, class libraries and related apps.
Sun could disappear tomorrow and Java would continue.
-- Alastair
A "written escrow agreement" is meaningless unless there is actually a third-party escrow trustee involved from the beginning. This is what escrowing is. (See http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=escrow)
The VARs and SIs should have known better.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
Moneydance, a pretty good pfm written in java was acquired by Appgen some time back. They may have seen it as a competitor. It was released to its original author and was reborn as Moneydance 2003 in June of this year. It is supported and for sale. It is lucky to have survived, Appgen had stopped supporting it, and it all but vanished.
Get a free ipod.
Yes yes, it all works in *theory*.
I'm now a project manager on a project where we just need to make some slight changes to a pre-built app. We have no documentation, (no docs of ANY kind), we got 24MB of source files that plain don't compile (even under their 'intended' environment), and we got a 70 table db schema; again, no documentation. The company hasn't been in business in MANY years, and was bought out, and the parent company doesn't care to fix the app (or send documentation). Better yet, the developers are nowhere to be found.
What if this was an Open Source project? At the very least, I could've compiled it! It's a 1 week job that will probably end up in rewriting the whole application from scratch (if we can get the funding for it; otherwise this particular government agency will run with such poor code until another person stumbles into this mess).
Having code doesn't mean a thing if it doesn't work (or only works with some proprietary tool that nobody uses).
(and on another project I've been on [similar situation], they didn't even have the source code; to save money, they decided to live with the old system/bugs/issues).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
The problem with source escrow is that it is only useful in the same was as your tape backups - if it is tested.
Sure, your escrow agreement probably says the source tree plus everything required to build the product from scratch (build environment, 3rd party libraries). But how do you know that is being done? The escrowee typically would have no idea.
With an escrow agreement you are going somewhat on the good faith of the company to provide everything required to the escrowee in a timely manner. Depending on who the vendor is you may or may not be able to trust that.
This isn't to say that escrow is not a good idea, but from an end-user point of view it isn't nearly as good as a public CVS repository. However, for a closed-source product it is better than nothing.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Another lesson is: don't buy a proprietary app from a company until that company has been evaluated for stability and the company has posted a bond against non-performance.
We don't buy applications from anyone that hasn't passed a strict evaluation. Financial stability, current or pending litigation, etc. If there's any chance at all they won't be around in a couple years, we don't use their products.