Good points. Many moons ago I wrote, as a contractor, a product for an application software company and they ended up losing the source code for the product (which they were selling as part of a very large application system). They were unable to fix it for Y2K and had to replace the whole product in their large application system. Why didn't I have source code? Well, I used their mainframe to develop it and that's where the source code lived. I was young and foolish. I had some ancient source code but it was many, many versions back.
In my software company I had a "hire" agreement with a customer. It said that if we went out of business, we agreed to notify them and give them the opportunity to hire John Doe, one of our programmers. I thought it was basically meaningless, but it was something of a win-win: cost us nothing, made them happy, and guaranteed John a job after we went bust (which we did not). Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of zMan Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2014 5:37 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Vendor Source Code 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
