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Comment by navaati | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, yes, that's crazy. On the other hand, an argument can be made that company accept proprietary software in binary form all the time, and this is no different !

Still a good laugh from the sidelines...

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> On the one hand, yes, that's crazy. On the other hand, an argument can be made that company accept proprietary software in binary form all the time, and this is no different !

It's a little different if only from a professional dignity perspective, lol. Also, every senior programmer I've ever worked with who makes use of third-party binaries will find a moment to say, "I'll just decompile it if it ever gives us any real trouble!"

Corporations have no professional dignity.

We deliver source to the customer, and include compiled binaries and installers as a (paid) courtesy.

Without the source, the customer loses the ability to switch software contractors, which is against their procurement rules. Even if you don't have the clout of being huge, not controlling the source for business-critical software is basically putting the supplier's gun up to your own head.

Companies that take binary-only delivery have obviously never hired anyone who could tell them they shouldn't do that.

Always get the source, or write it in-house.

Vast majority of companies rely on Microsoft and other proprietary software

I was not discussing computing infrastructure, such as the OS or office productivity suites, but rather custom business logic, that is specific to the company.

I once worked for a company that had a spreadsheet for plant production planning. The spreadsheet was put together by a consultant, but it was not protected - the company adjusted it constantly to maximize productivity at the plant. The consultant made more than the plant manager because he was the only person who understood the spreadsheet enough to make meaningful changes as required, e.g. when a machine on the line was replaced with another having a different capacity.

That's the ethical way to do it. If you give a business everything they ask for in requirements, the end result is probably going to be absurdly complicated for anyone to edit even with documentation, training, and open code.

We offer escrow of our source as an option for our customers who have concerns or policies about mission-critical software. The escrow includes instructions about tooling needed & versions (Visual Studio and others), any third-party (Telerik) or open-source things we use, database creation scripts, etc. A couple have run DR drills where they pulled the escrow, went through the instructions, and produced executables.

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