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Seconding the “source code in escrow” solution as a mitigation about concerns of working with a startup. IMO enterprise customers happy to pay for it and it usu

• another-dave 9y ago
  How does "code escrow" work in practice? Are you actively syncing to a private Git repo? Or is it more a case of, if we're collapsing, we'll put this in place?
  • seehafer 9y ago
    Correct there's some (not necessarily daily or weekly) amount of sync frequency that you negotiate.
  • dspillett 9y ago
    > Or is it more a case of, if we're collapsing, we'll put this in place? No-one would trust that. If you are collapsing you aren't going to care enough, or the people who do/did both care and know what to include (source, build toolchain setup, documentation) have already gone. It is surprising, given how important it could be, how little the clients bother to check that escrow updates are happening - so even if the contract says otherwise it could often come down to this! > Are you actively syncing to a private Git repo? Some do that, but in my experience it is more common to provide a snapshot (a full copy of the relevant parts of your repo(s) with supporting documents), with a new snapshot uploaded with each major or minor release. Sometimes it isn't released based but instead the client dictates escrow is updated "at least once per year or X months" which to my mind shows that part of the contract was written by a legal/admin person without a lot of technical experience.
  • another-dave 9y ago
    Haha, was thinking that wouldn't be too trusted alright! Scheduled syncing makes sense. Cheers for the replies, have never heard of the concept of code escrow before, seems like a neat solution