How to deal with "software end-of-life" situations?

Posted by rwong on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by rwong
Published on 2011-02-20T14:36:17Z Indexed on 2011/02/20 15:32 UTC
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contract

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sdlc

When a vendor declares that they no longer intend to provide any support or services to a piece of software (and stated the intent to exit the business - offering no upgrade paths), and stated that customers must pay a nominal fee in order to have the existing data exported, what kind of recourse do programmers/customers have?

Things I can think of:

Need to purchase spare hardware and set up a spare environment on which the software can continue to operate.
Various data export methods which do not require vendor involvement. (For example, screen scraping, printing to image followed by re-scanning, etc)
Parallel systems where staff will duplicate the old data into a new system manually or semi-automatically
Legal means, in case the vendor is in financial trouble

Any other ideas?

Assuming that there is no "circumvention" involved (no DRM, no DMCA), is data recovery or reverse engineering legal/acceptable?

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