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 fo

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)