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Comment by njyx | Hacker News Reader

This is a complete no-no. There really is no justification for this whatsoever.

What does "cover their bases" mean?

As them to explain what they are trying to achieve and find other ways to assuage their concerns.

The only legitimate thing is to have something in case you fail and they have "banked" on you. There is a legit way to solve that. basically if they want that tell them they should pay for an Escrow service - that will hold your code and they would receive it if you ever cease to exist. But it's important that they would need to pay those fees (they are significant.)

That should make them back down.

It's entirely unreasonable for them to demand access to source code.

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It's entirely unreasonable for them to demand access to source code.

The government and large corporations apparently disagree, or Microsoft wouldn't have their Shared Source Initiative. And for any nay-sayers in the crowd, that should be all that need be known: Microsoft thinks it's okay, and they have a lot more to lose than you do.

The only legitimate thing is to have something in case you fail and they have "banked" on you.

Which might be the exact thing they're trying to avoid. If your "machine learning" algorithm amounts to a bunch of nested if statements, they'd probably rather not "bank on you" in the first place.

Microsoft also has enough legal resources to assure recompense for any license or ip violations...

Bringing up Microsoft is neither here nor there.

Microsoft made the decision to create Shared Source Initiative only after they were very successful and only after a very, VERY detailed cost vs. benefit analysis.

Furthermore, they are handsomely paid for it (e.g in order to be eligible, you need to pay for at least 10k Windows licenses as per https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/enterprise-sour...) and it's ultimately up to Microsoft to grant/deny access.

And since we're talking about Microsoft, in the early days they were infamous for pumping competition for technical information under the guise of due diligence and then crushing said competition by developing competing products.

The person who asked the question is clearly not at the "successful monopoly" stage as Microsoft but more in the "there are legitimate concerns someone might steal our core ip" stage.

well I presume that MS does not provide access to code to direct competitors. Which is OP’s concern- client is building ML team and so on and they ask access to code.

National agencies such as FBI are not threat to MS to become competitor, unlike OP’s client.

I work for an enterprise company and we demand the source code for machine learning models from vendors all the time. This isn't like asking for the code to Excel. It's a model derived from our data that has likely no use for anyone but us and is highly susceptible to misunderstandings of the data. We absolutely need to verify your work.

Models are the output of the process. It's like going to graphic designer for work and them not giving you the PSD file. It's just not acceptable.

> You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

I have no idea what I'm talking about in this specific niche either... but does it normally go over well when you start a conversation that way?

I don't think people who start conversations like that are able to effectively gauge other human's reactions, they're kinda inter-related lol.

I have removed the comment.

It's just frustrating that this poor startup is going to make a monumentally bad decision based on people in here who have no zero clue what they are talking about.

The parent comments author has this in the profile:

>about: CEO at http://www.3scale.net

I'd venture to say there is at least some qualification to answer here. </sarcasm>

By this logic the said designer should also get Photoshop source code from Adobe.

I think you make an interesting point, ml models and algorithms are two different things.

I also think it's reasonable to ask for a model so you can test and validate it yourself.

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