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.

Comments

... news at eleven.

[ultrabot]

Don't be a Sharecropper.

The Appgen product is expected to continue...

[Deviate_X]

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...

Re:Source code escrow

[RocketJeff]

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.

Re:Escrow and bankruptcy

[sphealey]

And when the company goes bankrupt and you find the source is not in escrow (or not all of the source is in escrow, or there is third-party IP in the escrowed source, or ...):

who are you going to sue?

The escrowee. That's what he is for. If he doesn't subrogate against the supplier's officers as individuals, them too. Although they are probably bankrupt you can still take away their childrens' college fund.

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

Re:Escrow and bankruptcy

[irix]

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.