alt Hacker News> End-of-life contracts: cloud-vendors should contractually spell out what happens if they can't afford to keep the servers running.
I'm trying to imagine how this would be enforced when a company shutters and it's principals walk away.
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It's a good question--I am not a lawyer.
But that's the point of contracts, right? When a company shuts down, the contracts become part of the liabilities. E.g., if the contract says "you must pay each customer $1000 if we shut down" then the customers become creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding. It doesn't guarantee that they get all (or any) money, but their interests are negotiated by the bankruptcy judge.
Similarly, I can imagine a contract that says, "if the company shuts down, all our software becomes open source." Again, this would be managed by a bankruptcy judge who would mandate a release instead of allowing the creditors to gain the IP.
Another possibility is for the company to create a legal trust that is funded to keep the servers running (at a minimal level) for some specified amount of time.
(cont. thinking...) One possibility. A 3rd party manages a continually updating data escrow. It'd add some expense and complexity to the going concern.
Putting stuff in escrow is usually the way to go: escrow service is paid upfront (say, always for the next 3 months), and that's the time you've got to pull out your data.
My company does that with a few small vendors we've got for the source code we depend on.