And if that unknown small company goes out of business, then what?
I've been on both sides of that equation - the vendor and the client. When I was working for the vendor, the only way that we were able to secure our biggest deal was to put our entire software stack in escrow -both the proprietary development platform and the system we built for them on top of it. *
As the client, part of the contract was that they had to put their code in escrow.
In both cases, the client was large enough to negotiate those terms. What if you aren't large enough to force those terms?
* That worked out well for me. When the company I worked for went belly up, the client that enforced those terms hired me to complete their system since they had the right to the source code and I was the only person on the planet that was available that knew how both the C based development platform and their implementation worked well enough to complete it.
I've been on both sides of that equation - the vendor and the client. When I was working for the vendor, the only way that we were able to secure our biggest deal was to put our entire software stack in escrow -both the proprietary development platform and the system we built for them on top of it. *
As the client, part of the contract was that they had to put their code in escrow.
In both cases, the client was large enough to negotiate those terms. What if you aren't large enough to force those terms?
* That worked out well for me. When the company I worked for went belly up, the client that enforced those terms hired me to complete their system since they had the right to the source code and I was the only person on the planet that was available that knew how both the C based development platform and their implementation worked well enough to complete it.