[bigtunacan]

I've never worked for a company where we shipped the code directly to the client; that seems a bit risky for the company producing the code.

I did work for a startup though where all of the code was backed up and sent offsite to an escrow service. It was part of our standard contract that if the company ceased operations all clients would have received copies of the code. This was a pretty big deal to quite a few clients as one of the biggest risks for a larger client investing in using software from a small company is lost sunk costs if the startup fails. If the client has this type of agreement in place it is much less risky. If the startup fails then a heavily entrenched client would request to receive the code and more often than not hire one or more of the now unemployed software developers either as employees or consultants to either maintain the software or train someone else to.

@frazras actually from this context since I believe it is a fairly common problem, the closed casket paid service makes a lot of sense. What would be ideal is if it could essentially be turned into a GitHub/BitBucket (private) style service that is dead simple to use, but also acted as an escrow service. You would need a means of tracking clients, but not allowing them access unless terms of contract were met that allows access. Then it would also need to lock down the codebase in some manner; don't allow repo deletes, do backup snapshots, something like this so you can guarantee the startup doesn't breach contract.

[IgorPartola]

I think you are actually right, it was done via Iron Mountain. I wasn't directly involved with the process, only was aware of it.