Re: Will your chosen CMS vendor go bust?

On 6/10/05 6:04 PM, "Paul Duthoit" <[email protected]> wrote:

> The buyer, then, has some way forward for it to be managed and
> supported by another developer. So Escrow shows the client that the vendor
> believes and has confidence in his product.

Personally I don't believe any signal that you might go under delivers
confidence. Adding an escrow clause in a license agreement is unusual and
usually a signal of code that has come from a 'custom development house'
rather than the form of agreement more common for a software product. Escrow
clauses are usually pushed by the lawyers of customers (especially where
custom code or integration is included), as a result, including them says "I
am willing to alter my standard product agreement for you". In our case, we
would not give customers different legal agreements for the same thing or
allow that level of corporate bullying.

> 
> We can't all be a Microsoft (or another Big Boy with fat marketing budgets)
> so Escrow gives smaller developers something to offer if the 'show stopper'
> for a vendor to buy is that the vendor is small.
> 
> Some of the arguments on this list seem to be 'only go open source or buy
> from the Big Boys' unfortunately.


We are neither open source nor a 'big boy'. We have just decided that simply
because we are not big doesn't mean that we have to let customers dictate
unfair requirements. If this is the only 'deal-breaker' then I believe the
customer was focused on the wrong buying criteria, letting legal and/or risk
issues become more important that a product's suitability to their business
needs is poor decision making ­ better to move on to the next customer who
is more interested in how you will solve their problems than in how you
might create some.

The choice between Open Source and Proprietary Products is about much more
than who owns the code and some vague insurance policy. Also, I believe that
adding Escrow clauses will not level the playing field with big vendors, if
anything it signals the difference and reinforces the perceived but untrue
adage that it is higher risk to buy from a smaller organisation. Do
customers really want to end up with the code of a dead product?