Potential clients have many factors influencing their decision over which software supplier to use for their development project, and one of the key factors that comes up frequently is the ownership of the intellectual property, ie total ownership of the software we produce. On this point, we are often considered negatively by potential customers because Assanka does not assign the intellectual property of the software we develop to anyone else.
There are several very good reasons for that. Most importantly, any reasonably large software system will include dozens of components that are either open source or used under licence from third party suppliers. We can guarantee that when we obtain these licences, they permit us to sublicence the use of the components to you. But we don't own the components, so neither can you. And since the total solution we develop comprises these components in conjunction with reusable modules of our own as well as new, original code, the system only becomes useful when all of these are combined. Your licence represents the right to use and profit from the complete package of components and code that make up the system developed for you.
There are only a few things that you could choose to do that would infringe the licence. One is to use it for a purpose significantly different to the one for which it was designed, and another is to sell or sublicence copies of the system or any part of it. So if you want to further develop your business, taking your software to the next stage, with our without our help, you will always be able to do that. However if you or another supplier contracted by you deconstructed the software and used the resulting code to develop an entirely different product, those actions may compete with us. Even more importantly, it may also result in Assanka's standard code modules becoming public, and that poses a competitive threat to all our customers, whose systems benefit from the original ideas contained within that code.
We have no interest in placing contractual strangleholds on our customers, and indeed we will assist you in making the transition to another agency if you want to make the switch. Our customers stay with us for the long term because we're good, not because they're tied in.