Who Owns Your Software If the Company That Built It Disappears?
Most companies think they own their software because they paid for it. The real test comes when the people who built it are suddenly unavailable. If your team cannot access the source code, cloud account, deployment credentials, app store accounts, documentation, or third-party services without the vendor, you may own the product on paper while lacking practical control over it.
Imagine this. It is Monday morning and your development partner has stopped responding. Their website is down. Emails bounce. Your application is still online, customers can still sign in, and nothing appears broken.
Then someone asks a simple question:
“Can we deploy a fix ourselves?”
Nobody in the room knows. That is when software ownership stops being a contract phrase and becomes an operating problem.
Owning the Code Is Only the First Layer
Source-code ownership gets most of the attention because it is easy to understand. If another company built...
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