Most vendor products that provide meaningful value also are internally quite large and complex. Very few if any sites that inherited a source escrow from a vendor which goes out of business or sunsets a technology can support those products. Sometimes the products themselves include technology built using protected IP from IBM, or other vendors that is protected by non-disclosure arrangements. Consider that source escrow does not automatically imply the ability for a company that received an escrow to further disclose or share that IP with others (the community). You mostly likely cannot just take an escrow tape and upload it to GitHub. The product might today be something you like but the firm is mostly likely going to be better served by locating a replacement than by trying to nurse along Abandonware. Source escrow just isn't worth the trouble for most systems infrastructure products.
Just my .02 speaking only for myself. Best Regards, Sam Knutson -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2017 8:54 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Software vendor trying to force MSU based contract On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 3:00 AM, Dave Wade <[email protected]> wrote: > I am going to say something you gentlemen may not like... > > 1) Do you need the product? > 2) Do you need continued support, e.g. for legal and compliance reasons? > 3) is the company in financial difficulties? > > If the answer to all these is "yes" then paying the increased charges > may be your best option. If the company folds or files for protection > it matters not how many bits of paper you have, if there is no > business to honor the contracts you have then replacing the product > may be much more expensive. In my humble IBM is the biggest player of > these sorts of games and is doing an excellent job of squeezing the > last drop of blood from its traditional mainframe customers.. > > .. and throwing lawyers at a problem usually drives the costs up even > more... > I think you have some very valid points. I don't think that _any_ software company offers the following "option", but it is one that I'd like. What I _wish_ every company would "require" from a vendor is that should the vendor either "go out of business" or "sunset a product", that the customer would get a copy of the current source for the product, along with all internal documentation. No, I have not been taking any "funny pills". I do realize that perhaps all of the current z/OS vendors would like like hyenas if anyone asked this of them. Which is yet another reason that I am a FOSS advocate. An individual company might not be able to support "some product", but the "community" could possibly do so. -- "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion Maranatha! <>< John McKown The contents of this e-mail are intended for the named addressee only. It contains information that may be confidential. Unless you are the named addressee or an authorized designee, you may not copy or use it, or disclose it to anyone else. If you received it in error please notify us immediately and then destroy it ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
