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In your opinion is it common and ethical to do custom software development for a Customer and then add that software to your base product which is available to your other customers?

My take on it is that:

  1. It's a contractual issue between you and the Customer.
  2. It's done often (although maybe not 'common').
  3. It's similar to the Customer paying to have their pet feature bumped up the development priority queue.

Can anyone point to any well known (or at least public) examples of this?

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  1. You are right, it should be a contractual obligation over who owns the source code. Many vendors will sell the finished product to the client but keep the source code, others will give the whole thing away (which is S.O.P. with our company)

  2. I imagine it gets done, just not sure as far as the scope or depth of the copying.

I can't think of any well-known examples (primarily because business between two companies isn't often publicized), but a personal example is when we developed a much more flexible time-tracking system in one of our client applications and it turned out so well that we implemented it into our own personal time-tracking system (which wasn't that great out the gate).

于 2009-04-17T12:21:19.557 回答
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From an ethical standpoint, I think it's actually quite simple: It's a matter of what your customer perceives you to be doing. Do they think you are customizing your product for them, or do they think they are paying for their pet requests to be bumped up in your feature queue?

于 2009-04-17T12:19:08.530 回答
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作为一个极端的观点：如果所有定制代码都不能在其他任何地方使用，那么在某些时候你将无法继续你的业务而不违反该规则。

作为相反的极端：如果所有定制代码最终都成为通用产品，那么没有客户会再向您提供他们的具体问题。

当然，这两种观点都非常极端，在我看来不太可能发生到那种程度。

就我个人而言，我会非常清楚地向新客户说明，通常所有（自定义）代码都可以在其他产品和项目中使用，除非事先同意不对代码的特定部分这样做。然后，如果某些部分关起门来对他们来说真的很重要，他们会告诉你。

于 2009-05-03T20:36:33.790 回答