Brian St. Pierre has an excellent rebuttal of Prof Lessig’s proposal for code escrow. Lessig has been listening for far too long to people whose idea of software development lies in reimplementing stock protocols and IETF standards (not that there’s anything wrong in that stuff). Somebody should take Lessig around the code – and only the code – for a largish CRM system and tell him to make sense out of it. Code escrow is meaningless without docs, and specs, and the entire painful process of business analysis that’s so easy to get wrong that accompanies the creation of a large software system. And if you wish to escrow docs et al, you have just set foot on a slippery slope you cannot define. Me, I think Rahul Dave’s Loving Software makes sense. If only it had a better name. Good luck selling Lovin’ Software to your CFO