[flossly]

I like the authors remark on "source code FLOSS escrow" at the bottom of the article.

It's prolly hard to achieve legally, but the idea that a software is close source until it's no longer sold then automatically becomes open source would attract me as a potential user/buyer of the software: less lock-in in the worst-case scenario (being fully dependent on it wile company goes bust or decides to cancel the project).

Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

<<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>

[anamexis]

It's not quite FLOSS escrow, but source code escrow is somewhat common among big enterprise software contracts. There are companies that facilitate this, e.g. https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/

[flossly]

Did not know that... Thanks.

[kjs3]

Software escrow is extremely common. I have worked places with escrow for Windows source code, for example.

[Asooka]

I honestly do not think source code will be all that useful. Make it so redistribution, decompilation, reverse-engineering and reimplementation is legal after sales stop and that covers it.

[pabs3]

Why wouldn't the source code be useful?

You might need old binaries to build it, but shove those in a VM and you should be good to go. If they used Debian, then they could even publish the exact snapshot.debian.org date to download the binaries from, and which binaries.

Perhaps they had proprietary dependencies they couldn't get the code released for, but then you could port the source code to open equivalents.