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There are a few others doing it, but I think it's a terrible idea. There's a lesson to be learned from the insurance industry on this one. You'd essentially b

by blihp 8y ago

There are a few others doing it, but I think it's a terrible idea. There's a lesson to be learned from the insurance industry on this one. You'd essentially be providing an insurance policy to your customers (i.e. the payout is source code to your application) when they have no insurable interest (i.e. the success of your business.) What this means is that they can benefit from your failure while having no actual interest in seeing you succeed. Perversely, if one of them wants the source code, then they do have an interest in seeing you fail. They may not try to kill your business directly, but it can actually be against their interest to supply you with more business which would keep it worth your while / viable. Instead, I'd suggest thinking about their concerns and come up with a mutually beneficial way to address them. If they're worried about you walking away from it, offer them a long term support arrangement with some legal teeth where there's enough $$$ involved to guarantee your continued engagement. Bus factor... meh, you're a one-person shop... if they want to mitigate that risk, have them pony up some money and you'll be happy to staff up. etc. etc.

YorkshireSeason 8y ago
This is an interesting point that had not occurred to me. However one could argue that customers "benefit[ing] from your failure" is not the case. Typically a customer buys software because they lack (or are not willing to provide) the internal capacity to buy and evolve the software themselves. If the software producer fails, this will slow-down or kill software evolution, bug fixes, production of documentation etc, thus hurting the customer. As but one data point, consider Windows XP, which is still in widespread usage as of October 2018. Avoiding this scenario is the customer's interest in the producer's continued success.
- blihp 8y ago
  For small businesses, sure. But don't underestimate how perverse big businesses can be. If you have the expertise they want (even better: expertise in code form), and some off-shore body shop has the cheap labor they want... hey, let's kill off the vendor, get the source code and ship it over to XYZ coders to cut our support costs. General Motors and General Magic is an example of a large company that didn't fight too hard to keep a smaller company afloat once they put up their IP: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/business/technology-briefing-software-general-magic-to-shut-its-operations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/business/technology-brief... (iirc, the other vendor was EDS which General Motors had an interesting relationship with at the time)
forkerenok 8y ago
Counterpoint: Many companies really want to, but cannot use, some great opensource projects just because they lack serious* commercial backing. So I agree with the sibling on this one.
abraae 8y ago
We did a deal like this with a giant IT company with a 3 letter acronym for a name. We had a "break glass" option. If the client wanted to take over the code, they had to pay us a prearranged amount. The actual amount in our case was about 2 x the lifetime revenue to us of the deal from memory. This seemed to work well, they had insurance, but we knew that if they ever broke the glass we'd be laughing to the bank. At one stage things got tetchy and we hoped they would break the glass - but they never did.
- blihp 8y ago
  Something along these lines makes much more sense: the other party got the insurance they want, your company got a non-trivial payment in the event that they walk away against the customer's wishes. Both parties have incentive to make things work. That's very different than 'if we ever stop offering this product, we'll just open source it'
  - abraae 8y ago
    I think it works well for megacorp clients too. A future option for a few million dollars is way easier for them to get over the line than some strange, and intangible open source scenario, when they don't want the code ever open sourced anyway.

by blihp 8y ago

YorkshireSeason 8y ago

This is an interesting point that had not occurred to me. However one could argue that customers "benefit[ing] from your failure" is not the case. Typically a customer buys software because they lack (or are not willing to provide) the internal capacity to buy and evolve the software themselves. If the software producer fails, this will slow-down or kill software evolution, bug fixes, production of documentation etc, thus hurting the customer. As but one data point, consider Windows XP, which is still in widespread usage as of October 2018. Avoiding this scenario is the customer's interest in the producer's continued success.

blihp 8y ago
For small businesses, sure. But don't underestimate how perverse big businesses can be. If you have the expertise they want (even better: expertise in code form), and some off-shore body shop has the cheap labor they want... hey, let's kill off the vendor, get the source code and ship it over to XYZ coders to cut our support costs. General Motors and General Magic is an example of a large company that didn't fight too hard to keep a smaller company afloat once they put up their IP: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/business/technology-briefing-software-general-magic-to-shut-its-operations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/business/technology-brief... (iirc, the other vendor was EDS which General Motors had an interesting relationship with at the time)

forkerenok 8y ago

Counterpoint: Many companies really want to, but cannot use, some great opensource projects just because they lack serious* commercial backing. So I agree with the sibling on this one.

abraae 8y ago

We did a deal like this with a giant IT company with a 3 letter acronym for a name. We had a "break glass" option. If the client wanted to take over the code, they had to pay us a prearranged amount. The actual amount in our case was about 2 x the lifetime revenue to us of the deal from memory. This seemed to work well, they had insurance, but we knew that if they ever broke the glass we'd be laughing to the bank. At one stage things got tetchy and we hoped they would break the glass - but they never did.

blihp 8y ago
Something along these lines makes much more sense: the other party got the insurance they want, your company got a non-trivial payment in the event that they walk away against the customer's wishes. Both parties have incentive to make things work. That's very different than 'if we ever stop offering this product, we'll just open source it'
- abraae 8y ago
  I think it works well for megacorp clients too. A future option for a few million dollars is way easier for them to get over the line than some strange, and intangible open source scenario, when they don't want the code ever open sourced anyway.