Software developers are often requested by their clients to implement a software escrow agreement. Software escrow is a three-party agreement between a software developer (the depositor), the end user (beneficiary) and the software escrow vendor. The objective of a software escrow agreement is to provide comfort to the end user that if the software developer is unable or unwilling to support the application, the beneficiary has the ability to request a copy of the deposit materials which may include source code, deployment scripts, and documentation to be released from the software escrow vendor. The software escrow agreement will outline the responsibilities of all the parties and usually includes the pre-defined release conditions.
With any software escrow agreement, the developer is required to deposit the source code of the application on an agreed frequency. The traditional methodology for source code deposits has been either on physical media or a manual upload to an FTP site. Using this manual method can cause problems, such as length of time it takes to deposit the source code or forgetting to deposit the source code on the agreed frequency.
To avoid this manual deposit process, which can ultimately result in having its problems, the best solution would include an automated deposit process. Most developers today use a Git such as GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab as a repository for their source code management and deployment. It is only natural that the next step is to integrate the software escrow deposit to be part of this framework. This methodology for depositing code has many advantages for both the developer and the beneficiary which are explained below.
Here are the 5 top reasons software developers should escrow their code directly from Git: