Licensing Commercial Source Code? 52
toughguy asks: "I'm the principal in a software startup that develops web apps for a relatively small market. We typically run our software for our customers in hosted environment (kinda like SalesForce.com). We've got some large potential customers who are more sophisticated and would run our application in-house. They'd also like to be able to do more customization using their internal development staff. This customization would require us to give them our source code. This, frankly, gives me the willies. The source code for our application represents millions of dollars of invested time and energy. At this point, we're not interested in open-sourcing the whole thing. I'm interested in knowing how other people have handled similar situations. What protections did you have in place? A good lawyer is a must. A good contract with the customer that makes it clear what they can and can't do with the code. How have you handled similar situations?"
"From a technological stand-point we'd considering watermarking the code in some form for each customer, but this has problems in that if the customer makes significant changes then the watermark may be illegible. We're also considering some sort of Encrypted key scheme that would tie the software to a particular server or something like that. I'd be interested in knowing what other protections you may have used in the past.
If you've been in a similar situation in the past can you share your story with how things worked out. Horror stories are appreciated as well as the 'happily-ever-after' types."
If you've been in a similar situation in the past can you share your story with how things worked out. Horror stories are appreciated as well as the 'happily-ever-after' types."
Just say NO, in their language... (Score:5, Funny)
We told them "No." But we said it in a way that they understood. It sounded something like...
"We custom-built this system over the last 6 years around a centrally-hosted architecture. If you'd like to give us a $500,000.00 down-payment we'll get started on porting this to a stand-alone solution right away, but please realize that you will need to bear all costs of development, we won't guarantee when it will be finished, and once it's done, you'll have to bear all costs of maintenance and upgrades to software and hardware, and you'll probably need to have at least one full-time employee to oversee it the whole time. Oh, and we'll need to work out all sorts of legal paperwork before we'll be able to deliver anything."
"...or you could just continue to use our existing system, and we'll address whatever problems you think would be solved by 'moving it in-house'."
They chose the latter option. The funny thing was, we could never dig out any real reasons why they wanted to move the thing in-house in the first place.
Re:Plugin Architecture (Score:2, Funny)
Too true, too true. But how could you forget the obligatory link [thedailywtf.com]?