I am very negative on the benefits of escrow. Here's a mental exercise. Scenario (1). You hire a new developer. You sit him or her down next to the existing developers. You share all of the little tips and tricks with the new person. You share source code libraries, JCL libraries, etc. How long before that person is able to do things more or less on his or her own? Two months? Three months? Six months?
Scenario (2). You are using some vendor product. It blows up in production. You call the vendor and no one answers the phone. You Google and find they have gone out of business. You get your lawyers to contact the escrow agent. After some amount of process you obtain the source code, which may or may not be current and complete and may or may not include internals documentation and little things like JCL libraries. You put a programmer to work on it loading the source code, learning to build it, and finding and fixing the bug and testing the fix. And all this is going to happen in time to save your production? Really? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Knutson, Samuel Sent: Sunday, March 5, 2017 4:39 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Software vendor trying to force MSU based contract 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
