Comment by dTal
7 years ago
Source escrow is an interesting concept. My initial thought it that would create huge perverse incentives. A company might continue to release small, nonsense updates to products they otherwise don't care about, just to avoid giving the source away. Meanwhile, as the owner of a device, I would be eagerly awaiting the death of the company, so I can get my hands on that juicy source code. I certainly wouldn't recommend their products! Anything to make them die more quickly.
It gets even more interesting when the "secret sauce" is in software. Say I market "SmartButton 1.0", which is nothing more than an ESP8266 connected to a button, but with some cunning algorithms and proprietary protocols that make it useful. Under an escrow system, I'll have a competitor on my hands the second I stop supporting SmartButton 1.0. Even if I'm already on SmartButton v19.
The SmartButton scenario is exactly the incentive we want, isn't it?
If you have made genuine improvements in versions 2-19, releasing version 1 shouldn't hurt too much. If, on the other hand, your versions 1 and 19 are still substantially similar, you shouldn't stop supporting version 1 to save a small cost and completely destroy the value of the product for your customers.