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Going off topic here, but we have an enterprise lead for our SaaS product who is asking the same. They want some sort of warranty that they can keep hosting the

Going off topic here, but we have an enterprise lead for our SaaS product who is asking the same. They want some sort of warranty that they can keep hosting the product themselves, should we go bust. Going open source (or open core) is currently not an option for us. Does anyone have any advice how to approach this? Example contracts, good experiences with escrow services maybe? Or bad experiences of course.

true_religion 9y ago
It's difficult to do for SaaS since you're not already packaging up the product. Datomic has perpetual free licenses so if they go bankrupt, you just keep the software you already have. If you had an on-prem setup or a hosted white label solution, then it'd be easier to license.
twic 9y ago
I worked for a company which sold hosted services in the financial sector. Escrow was a standard part of contracts. However, it wasn't taken immensely seriously; we faithfully put all of our source code into escrow once a year (or perhaps more often, but not as often as we released), but not all of the build, deployment, and infrastructure tools and config you would actually need to turn that code into a replica of the application. We didn't make any effort to "restore from backup" to verify that what was in escrow was actually any use. Customers, and their auditors, seemed happy with that. I do feel that in a really well-run operation, your build, deploy, and operation should be so automated that that's just another set of repositories to put in escrow. One way to look at it is that escrow is just another kind of disaster recovery; if you have safe copies of everything you would need to restore your operations if you lost all your current servers, then it's easy to put those in escrow too.
- user5994461 9y ago
  It's more meaningful for a shrink wrap software. It's easy to archive and handover the code repo, packages and documentation. It's not really effective for saving a cloud hosting. A platform like that is not easily redeployable.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  Thanks. Do you know what escrow service that was?

true_religion 9y ago

It's difficult to do for SaaS since you're not already packaging up the product. Datomic has perpetual free licenses so if they go bankrupt, you just keep the software you already have. If you had an on-prem setup or a hosted white label solution, then it'd be easier to license.

twic 9y ago

I worked for a company which sold hosted services in the financial sector. Escrow was a standard part of contracts. However, it wasn't taken immensely seriously; we faithfully put all of our source code into escrow once a year (or perhaps more often, but not as often as we released), but not all of the build, deployment, and infrastructure tools and config you would actually need to turn that code into a replica of the application. We didn't make any effort to "restore from backup" to verify that what was in escrow was actually any use. Customers, and their auditors, seemed happy with that. I do feel that in a really well-run operation, your build, deploy, and operation should be so automated that that's just another set of repositories to put in escrow. One way to look at it is that escrow is just another kind of disaster recovery; if you have safe copies of everything you would need to restore your operations if you lost all your current servers, then it's easy to put those in escrow too.

user5994461 9y ago
It's more meaningful for a shrink wrap software. It's easy to archive and handover the code repo, packages and documentation. It's not really effective for saving a cloud hosting. A platform like that is not easily redeployable.
skrebbel 9y ago
Thanks. Do you know what escrow service that was?