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Source Code Escrow

Posted by michael on from the my-precious dept.

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."

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. This is not new. And it's not that useful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Even non-compiling source code is useful by mib · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I've seen a lot of people comment that unmaintained source code is not useful. This is a fairly big assumption, and I'd wager few of you have actually been in the situation of losing a mission critical piece of software due to vendor abandonment.

    I have. Several times.

    Even non-compiling source code is very useful, for at least two reasons, and likely many more.

    1. 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.

    2. 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