It was frustrating. As it was me who got to speed weeks figuring out what this guy did. My group figured out the root cause though was the software was not do

It was frustrating. As it was me who got to speed weeks figuring out what this guy did. My group figured out the root cause though was the software was not doing what he wanted. So we made up a new group to sell that custom service to others. Everyone eventually came out ahead there. Because someone in his management chain realized that we had a good breach of contract case. Weird is nice for what he was doing. He was being a jerk because the stuff was forced on him. It broke his small empire of spreadsheets he was holding the company hostage with. Our 'mistake' was assuming our customers were rational. Many are. But you always have a handful that seem to just be in a bad place in life and they like to take it out on others. For IoT devices/cell/etc it could be 'bad' to give out the root password from a company PoV. As there are so many out there with the exact same password on several thousand devices (poor security but you can image a thousand devices in a few hours). So once given out it is written down into some wiki and everyone has it now (welcome to the botnet). So if you get one change whatever you were given and assume everyone else has it. Or maybe the 'secret sauce app' is under some random user account. But give out root and that special secret account is bypassed. Then it is off to china somewhere to be ripped apart and resold under a new brand name and half the cost. Then on top of that lets say you are a nice company giving the thing out. That means you will need some sort of training for your support guys. Documentation on how to do it. And so on. Those things cost money for a EoL product you no longer make anything on. Like I said there is a list of things as to why not to do it. There is also an interesting list of why to do it. But the upside is low for the company to allow it. I wish more companies would do it. But it is rare. If people want companies to do this, the company has to be incentivized to want to spend any time/money on it. If people can make this an upside to companies doing this and not 'shame' and 'you broke the law' the companies will help.