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Source Code Escrow
Makarand writes "According to this article in The Economic Times (India) Software companies in India
are embracing the trend where source code for the software being bought or sold
is
kept safe with an escrow agent
with carefully drafted agreements. This allows
the buyer to get hold of the source code in cases where software was licensed from a
start-up which has now folded or a breach of contract regarding the maintenance services
that were agreed upon can be proven. The source code is automatically released
upon the occurrence of any of the events mentioned in the escrow agreement and the
buyer will be able to study the source code and continue to provide support services
for the software bought without relying on the employees of the software supplier."
Source code escrow is a very old idea. I used it at my last job when in a situation where the two parties had not had a great relationship.
The trouble with the code escrow is that, of course, if the relationship (or the programmers' company) goes to hell then the buyer of the code will have a big lump of code that may or may not be obfuscated. It's questionable whether the code can be completed at all, let alone brought to market in a reasonable time period.
Another problem is that the escrow company we used charged fees for receiving the source code discs in the mail, additional fees if you actually wanted them to insert them in a computer and report what files existed, and exorbitant fees if you had the nerve to want them to compile and link the files. I don't know if they even offered the ability to run the resulting application to see what happened (i.e. to see whether the developer sent you the source for your project, or sent you the source for gcc running on a Sun 3).
It seems like a market opportunity for an IT-oriented company that has spare cycles, if any of those exist. Could be a nice sideline business. Advertising should be pretty easy; we had a hard time even finding the one (not very good) escrow service that we used.
These are very real possibilities. They are also common outcomes in IT projects of years past. A source escro is mostly an agreement between a finished software vendor and a client. Between a company and a sub-contractor it's simply CYA. (And not a very good form at that.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This comes up time and time again. There is an underlying assumption which is often voiced that there is a substantial quality difference between US code and Indian code.
This is usually bolstered with stuff like "art" and "quality", and "design".
Do you know what the difference between the illegal immigrant house painter that does cash-only jobs and the US programmer that holds your view point is ?
One of them is a pretentious asshole, and may have invested more heavily in formal education.
If people wanted "design" and "quality" and "art", nobody would buy Kia's. South Korea and Taiwan wouldn't have booming economies, and 95% of the clothes you wear wouldn't be made by children in malaysia.
But, as it turns out, by and large nobody gives a crap about those, or, they've made the determination that outsourced ultra cheap labour does the job acceptably well given the cost incurred.
Programming is no different. It's not like 50 years of American software engineering has produced an obelisk of invincible bug free code. No, we had Y2k, Windows 95, and a US vs Metric bug in a satellite.
Coding for Coding's sake is not a national treasure, it is not an art form, and really, it has nothing tod o with making money. IS/IT are a COST CENTER. Hiring programmers does NOT SELL SHOES. It does NOT SAVE LIVES. Everybody should be looking to save money on software development unlesss their business is software development! Otherwise it is an expense and subject to the inhouse vs outsourced discussion, just like any other expense!
Now, if your point had been "it's a shortsighted view to think you'll come out financially ahead by outsourcing software development to indian labor instead of using off the shelf stuff or using US based consultants", then you'd have an argument. But instead it smacks of idolization of the US intellect and the programmers-guild mentality so prevalent in the US/unix world.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I have. Several times.
Even non-compiling source code is very useful, for at least two reasons, and likely many more.
Interoperability/data extraction
Chances are if your software is abandoned, you're migrating to something else. Getting that data out of your old system is a lot easier if you can see the code that put it in there, as is writing a compatible system.
Maintenance by Reverse Engineering
Just seeing how things works allows you to extend the life of software by working around and fixing new problems. A good example is some abandonware we had that was locked by license key to a fixed hostid. A trawl through the source code would have allowed us to reverse engineer a license key generator and easily move the system to a new host. (In the end we had to fix this with judicious use of LD_PRELOAD and fake gethostid() and hostname() calls, but making a new license key would have been much nicer.)
From a business point of view, I'd like all software to be licensed under a source escrow arrangement.
- mib