What Charles said. In spades. I knew a vendor who had a product that they kept writing binary patches for, because while they had the source code, they'd lost the build process (knowledge departed with a developer). And before anyone blames the vendor, it was a minor product and the loss occurred before they bought the product line from another company.
Rumor had it that Paint was rewritten for Windows 95 because Microsoft lost the source. While there's no real evidence of that as far as I can tell, anyone who's worked for a vendor believes it's at least possible. Still, any real vendor does do escrow, and it's not something I'd forego. At the very least, it shows some level of alleged rigor. And if the company goes bust, you might be able to hire their developers. It's insurance: after all, your insurance company could go bust, too, eh? On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:15 PM, Mark Post <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> On 5/8/2014 at 06:50 PM, Scott Ford <[email protected]> wrote: > > huh, does IBM permit you to buy source or CA ????? > > Source code escrow is not at all the same as buying the source code from a > vendor. I would be willing to bet that at least some of IBM's and CA's > larger customers have some source code in escrow. Think governments and > the like. "We won't license this product or any of your other products > unless you agree to put the source code for this particular package in > escrow." > > > Mark Post > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- zMan -- "I've got a mainframe and I'm not afraid to use it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
