Orphan software

A term that keeps coming up in my conversations is lock-in. It’s a term most often used in the context of large software platforms being easy to enter and hard to escape. You know the ones: you pop your data in, you build workflows, and then one day the price doubles, or the features get worse, or the terms change, and you realise the exit door is in fact just painted on the wall.

But there’s a sneakier type of lock-in without any Silicon Valley involvement. It’s when you commission the development of custom software from a third-party. The big risk here is what happens if that third-party goes bankrupt or, to use a common trope, gets hit by a bus. Suddenly, you’re a software orphan.

I’ve been on the developer side of this situation in a previous life and the solution we used was software escrow.

Software escrow is like a safety deposit box for source code. The developer gives a copy of the source code to this neutral agent. You have no access to it unless a trigger event takes place. These triggers are defined in the contract: bankruptcy, breach of support agreement, things like that.

If a trigger happens, the agent releases the code and you or another developer can then go on and maintain it.

It’s not a perfect solution. It won’t save you from a badly written contract and you need to make sure the source code is kept up to date by the developer. But it gives you an exit where there rarely is one.

There are plenty of European escrow services to choose from, so you can keep it local too.

Colin