3 ms·

Lesson learnt: If I had consultants, I’d ask for open-source delivery. Which has the side-effect of also advancing humanity, so we all win.

OJFord 5y ago
Is that even a lesson that needs to be learnt? Nuts not to, surely? Even this sort of issue aside, what happens when you want to add a feature and for whatever reason (that could include the original author's retirement or death!) hire someone else? Binary delivery seems like buying some cool-looking alien device that manufacturers widgets; you have no idea how it works or how to maintain it, so you just sell widgets hoping it keeps working without maintenance.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Imagine you're a company looking for software as a cloud service. Suppose the best software for the purpose only does 70% of what you want. So you contact the company who runs that cloud service and pay them to develop the additional features and specific business logic you need. Then you contract with them to manage private servers with your build on them. At no point have you seen or purchased source code - not even for the 30% new features that were written on your behalf. Those are entwined with, and only work as a result of, the other 70%. You're basically using a black box that's maintained by another company, and trusting in that company's competence and goodwill. That's essentially what the situation was here. If you sold your company and touted your special build of the software as a feature, and passed the contract along to the buyer, that would be fine. But if you misrepresented the situation and said you owned 100% of the code and were selling that along with the right to distribute it, that would be fraud. Of course, you could have gone the more expensive route and hired your own team of coders to write the whole thing from scratch, under whatever license you wanted, and then you would own the source. But if a company needs document software or meeting software in the cloud, how many pay to reinvent the wheel and roll their own?

OJFord 5y ago

Is that even a lesson that needs to be learnt? Nuts not to, surely? Even this sort of issue aside, what happens when you want to add a feature and for whatever reason (that could include the original author's retirement or death!) hire someone else? Binary delivery seems like buying some cool-looking alien device that manufacturers widgets; you have no idea how it works or how to maintain it, so you just sell widgets hoping it keeps working without maintenance.

noduerme 5y ago
Imagine you're a company looking for software as a cloud service. Suppose the best software for the purpose only does 70% of what you want. So you contact the company who runs that cloud service and pay them to develop the additional features and specific business logic you need. Then you contract with them to manage private servers with your build on them. At no point have you seen or purchased source code - not even for the 30% new features that were written on your behalf. Those are entwined with, and only work as a result of, the other 70%. You're basically using a black box that's maintained by another company, and trusting in that company's competence and goodwill. That's essentially what the situation was here. If you sold your company and touted your special build of the software as a feature, and passed the contract along to the buyer, that would be fine. But if you misrepresented the situation and said you owned 100% of the code and were selling that along with the right to distribute it, that would be fraud. Of course, you could have gone the more expensive route and hired your own team of coders to write the whole thing from scratch, under whatever license you wanted, and then you would own the source. But if a company needs document software or meeting software in the cloud, how many pay to reinvent the wheel and roll their own?