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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

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)