what happens to source code for old commercial software?

Question

Does anybody have first-hand experience as to what happens to source code from old/defunct products? Especially from those companies no longer in existence.

As a specific example for illustrative purposes, a company I worked for 15+ years ago developed an in-house Pascal compiler. That company is no longer in existence, and the products that were built with the Pascal compiler have long since been shelved. Yet, I would think that the source code for that commercial-grade Pascal compiler would be interesting and useful.

My educated guesses (no direct experience) are:

• here is a morass of legal issues that make releasing the source code in some manner difficult and/or expensive.
• probably not something on the mind of the persons locking the doors.
• technical difficulties such as reading old archives (tape drives, etc.)

Answer 1

You are right! Even if the company is closed or the software is too old, the copyright laws still apply. Of course the copyright time window differs from country to country, for example, in India it's Life + 60 years but in the United States it's Life + 70 years, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_length

Also, another important factor, is that everybody forgets and nobody cares. Its absolutely possible that they may give you the code (free or with some price) even if the company is closed or the product is obsolete.

Answer 2

The typical situation that does happen, is the person with copyright over the said product can decide to sell or keep the item. Though in my experience, the old source code is typically archived or is lost because its no longer can be sold.

Though there has been number of cases that the Publisher will not keep the source code but instead keep the copyright of the name of the product. Then they may at a later date sell the name and brand of the product to a development team to product a newer version. Though very rarely unless the original development team is kept the source code becomes obsolete within 1-2 months without continued work fall into non exsistance.

Answer 3

The people who have the power in this situation - the owner, some random lawyer somewhere, they probably don't care or would even know what you're talking about when it comes to something like a random tool. But for bigger projects, it's probably stickier.

For example, let's say Microsoft goes under tomorrow. You "steal" the code for some tool used to compile programs quickly on 64-bit machines. Nobody will care.

But if you happened to save the codebase to Microsoft Word and then re-released it as Dan's Word... well I think that'd raise a few eyebrows.

I worked at a smaller web 2.0ish company that has since gone under. All of the devs have a copy of the source code and the database schema, even though they probably shouldn't. And nobody cares.

Answer 4

You might want to go an check The Business of Software - Where do old source code go discussion.

Answer 5

A company I used to work for tried selling their code on eBay. I don't think anyone bought it.

Answer 6

Another option is that it lives on in Source Code Escrow this is one way a software company's customers can protect themselves from the the vendor going defunct. It was pretty popular during the dot-com boom/bust era, but I don't hear much talk about it anymore.

Answer 7

I worked for a government contractor around 15 years ago. I know that one of the stipulations in our contracts for using compilers and a few documentation support utilities (Booch diagramming for example) was that if the company were to go belly up or a number of other scenarios, that we had source code rights to the compiler so we could maintain it on our own. I've actually used similar language in some contracts for projects I've done with my own companies where I depended on a third party piece of software (not Microsoft sized companies!) giving me rights to their source if they left the project for a variety of reasons if there was no reasonable substitute in the open marketplace or they performed for-hire programming or extensive customization of their products.

I think beyond that the chances of actually recovering the source code would only be through developers personal copies of code or perhaps the founders keeping piles of old servers in their garages. Again - not talking about mega corporations here.