nem wrote:
> "Bill Buckels"  wrote in news:

>> 1. All Software must be placed into the Public Domain immediately upon
>> withdrawing sales and support. No exceptions.

It's interesting that this kind of situation arises in commercial
software contracts, as well.

Once I was acquiring a customized compiler and we hit a snag when
we found that source rights were not available (trade secrets,
you know).

We broke the impasse by settling on the requirement that the vendor
put the source code in escrow, so that we could be guaranteed of gaining
access to it in the event that the vendor stopped providing support for
some reason during the next fifteen years (many of our customers needed
long contract terms).

Without the source, we could not continue the support that our
customers demanded, and the compiler could not even be considered
as a suitable choice.

> Maybe. One might also add that the software should be made PD if the 
> author no longer has the source code for it.

I wonder if this would encourage them to safeguard their code or
lose it?  ;-)

-michael

******** Note new website URL ********

NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32