Photo Scanner: Software Escrow

Monday 12 November 2012

Software Escrow

The escrow agreements are most applicable to custom-developed software which is not available to the general public. In some cases, source code for commercial off-the-shelf software may be deposited into escrow to be released under a free software or open source license when the original developer ceases development and/or when certain fundraising conditions are met. This model is also called ransom-ware. The Blender graphics suite was released in this way following the bankruptcy of Not a Number Technologies; the widely used Qt toolkit is covered by a source code escrow agreement secured by the "KDE Free Qt Foundation".