An interesting, common sense debate was featured in Silicon.com last week. A panel of CIOs was asked whether they felt comfortable buying from small suppliers or whether they preferred dealing with the big players. There was a surprising degree of consensus that, in general, CIOs felt OK about small suppliers: indeed in some cases they actively preferred them. Perhaps this is a sign of a steady recovery in economic confidence, with CIOs preparing to come out of their shells into which they retreated in 2001 and 2002. As I have written about before, buying software from small suppliers carries risks, but this is true of big suppliers also. Just because a giant company may not go bust does not stop them dropping products for any number of reasons, as I can testify from personal experience.
The one element in the article that did make me smile was the assumption that code escrow was a form of insurance against a small vendor folding. Indeed code escrow arrangements have become quite standard in contracts, and generate modest fees for those organisations that provide the service. I hate to disillusion those CIOs, but code escrow is not the panacea it may seem. Sure, so you get the source code, but then what? Firstly, you have to hope that the vendor has been diligent about keeping their escrow up to date with the version of software that you are actually using. But more to the point, the raw code itself is of limited use without the design specifications that go along with it (at least assuming you actually want to continue developing it). Even if you are looking at basic support only, how well documented is the code? I had the misfortune to try and execute an escrow contract once when I was working at Esso. The tape of source code duly turned up and it was 3 million lines of undocumented assembler code. While my colleague (an expert at assembler code) got a misty gleam in his eye as he could see a job for life coming up, we concluded that we simply couldn’t justify taking this on, and opted to go for a complete replacement instead. So, if you are insisting on source code escrow from your vendor, be aware of the pitfalls and ask some searching questions about documentation.