I used to work for a smallish (<50 headcount) company that sold high-value software with a LOT of secret sauce in it (image processing algorithms) mostly to tel

I used to work for a smallish (<50 headcount) company that sold high-value software with a LOT of secret sauce in it (image processing algorithms) mostly to telco, wireless, and MSOs. The primary reason those folks wanted the source code was as insurance that if, as a smallish company, you went out of business, they would be jolly-well-rogered if they had deployed your stuff in the middle of their mission-critical revenue-generating operations. Our solution was always to use a mutually agreed third-party source code escrow service such as Iron Mountain. The only escrow release triggers were company insolvency/bankruptcy, or refusal to meet the SLA of support requests for an extended period of time (the -Off Clause).