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Developers Lose With Proprietary Software

Posted by michael on from the wah-wah-wah-waaaaaaaaaaah dept.

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.

4 of 394 comments (clear)

  1. Source Code Escrow by bcolflesh · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Developers in this situation should examine this type of arrangement:

    http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?sou rc e+code+escrow

  2. Use an escrow by LadyLucky · · Score: 1, Redundant
    Our company as part of the terms of sale state that if the company goes under, the source becomes available to all licensed customers through an escrow.

    Of course, I have no idea if it will be honoured :-)

    --
    dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
  3. Escrow by Orasis · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The solution is simple. Any intelligent company entering into a software license agreement should make sure that they have a source code escrow agreement in case the vendor goes belly up.

    This practice is becoming very standard nowadays and completely fixes this problem.

  4. Get it in escrow by shodson · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Many vendors offer the source code be placed in escrow in case of such an event. However this is only something you'll get for large, enterprise software products, not some utility or tool.