

Anybody here use Source Code Escrow? - mattculbreth

Hello All,<p>A potential customer is interested in having us save versions of our application in escrow.  In the event we go under they'd like some protection on their investment.<p>So I'm in the mood of pricing out some services that do these things.  I've also asked our attorneys if they do it.  Anybody here have a service they've used?
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justinsb
Have you considered instead selling your customer a source code license? When
we checked out the price of escrow services, we decided the revenue stream of
source code licensing was worth more to us than keeping the code strictly
confidential.

Obviously it depends on the price of your product, and how unique you believe
your code to be, and how trustworthy you consider you customer. For us,
because our product was relatively low-priced, and being a .NET app it was
fairly easy to decompile it anyway, the decision was pretty easy.

Incidentally, my understanding is that a lot of the price of escrow comes from
the pain if the counterparty tries to execute the escrow contract - I think
these things can be pretty contentious. Also, some escrow agents will verify
that your code builds, as I recall, so this isn't an entirely commodity
service.

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mattculbreth
Thanks. It wouldn't really work for us but we'd considered it.

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epi0Bauqu
Yes, I've used Iron Mountain. It is about 2K per year to store DVDs . Then of
course there are additional services such as getting them to verify data, run
things on data, etc., none of which I have used. I had occasion to re-examine
stored DVDs after a year, and all of them worked fine.

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mattculbreth
Just got a recommendation from the attorney (and he checked with other
attorneys) to consider Iron Mountain. So it's looking like they get the node
for now.

But man it seems very pricey to me. NGC (the other big one) is about the same.
Think there's a startup idea here? The problem is the stability of the escrow
agent I guess.

