What about losing the tool itself, never mind the data?

Any tool that's worth your money will have competitors. Sooner or later.

A vacuum of users who suddenly need a new service to shovel their money at will be quickly filled by the market.

Here's the dilemma in a slightly different context.

I -love- the game Master of Orion II. Every few months I dust it off and spend an entire weekend on it. Because I control the software, I can continue to enjoy it 13 years after the developer folded.

I built a Facebook game a few years back. The company that owns it decided to shut it down. I get messages -every day- from people who are dying to play again. But there's nothing they can do, they don't control the software.

> I built a Facebook game a few years back. The company that owns it decided to shut it down. I get messages -every day- from people who are dying to play again. But there's nothing they can do, they don't control the software.

Did you retain any rights, such that you could white-label and de-facebook-ize it, and stick it up on a webpage?

That's pretty unusual in contracted work. The customer would (not without reason) fear that you'd get them to pay for development and then just go ahead and rebrand it as a competing service. I generally try to retain rights on anything but "business logic" and UI but won't push very hard for it unless I'm going to be re-using my own code in the project.

It'd be interesting to have a clause stipulating that if the customer shuts down their instance of your code permanently, you reserve the right to start up your own. Do you think anyone could get away with that?

I'm not sure anyone who's spent their entire life programming in Emacs would take that well.

"Oh, yeah. Just get used to it. Notepad++ is so much more modern."

They'll move the Vim and then have the epiphany of realizing they where wrong all this time. Hopefully before their left hand becomes this unusable and RSI ridden extension of the rest of thier arm. Being serious, I think it's insulting to mention Notepad++ as a replacement for Emacs instead of a more capable editor! ;)

Maybe it's just me, but N++ seems to have far fewer abilities, extensions, etc than Vim or Emacs; and what's there is buggier and hasn't been fixed in years. It seems to be dying slowly and reluctantly. It's a very basic text editor with a few neat tricks and a lower learning curve, and that's about it.

Try a modern editor. Like vim, emacs, or textmate/e-texteditor, and look into what people have built for them. Then tell me you think N++ is more capable.

edit: bah! misreading sucks. delete that last line. Now I need a time machine :\

That's what I said bro. I'm a Vim user myself (and have been for a year too many) and I think it's the best thing since hot chocolate bread. I just used a semi complicated macro to edit 800 lines of a CVS document, which took me around 3 minutes to record, but saved me hours of work I would have had to spend manually doing most of it in Textmate (which I think is a really good editor, just not in the same league as Vim or Emacs) or any other modern editor for that matter.

As a Vim user I feel compelled to mix a shameless plug for my editor of choice in a conversation every time the topic shows it's head. Anyway, I think you misread my comment. I love Vim and I don't even run Windows (to run Notepad++).

Gerblagh, you're entirely right, my mistake.

Must be the finals-studying. I think my brain is going mushy.