Software Agreements

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Software agreements drafted and negotiated by lawyers who have shipped code: licenses, custom development, maintenance, distribution, escrow, and open source terms that protect your rights while letting the deal get done.

Software agreements decide how your technology gets built, licensed, supported, and sold, and they have to handle technical, commercial, and legal questions at once. We represent both technology providers and customers across the full range of these deals, from enterprise licenses to custom development to channel arrangements. Our attorneys wrote software before they practiced law, so we understand what a spec, an API, or a copyleft license actually commits you to.

Enterprise Licensing

Enterprise licenses turn on scope and metrics: whether you license by user, device, processor, or something else, and how growth is handled. We work through perpetual, subscription, and hybrid pricing, plus deployment rights for on-premises, private cloud, or vendor-hosted use. We also pin down the technical terms that derail deployments when ignored, including delivery, acceptance testing, integration with your existing systems, and the support that keeps the software running.

Custom Development

Custom builds live or die on scope and ownership. We define the work through specifications, statements of work, and change-order procedures, and we settle who owns the resulting code, how pre-existing background technology is licensed so it survives the engagement, and how completed work is accepted before payment milestones release. Warranty and liability terms then allocate the risk of the bugs and defects that every real project produces.

Maintenance And Distribution

Software needs ongoing care, so maintenance and support agreements set service levels for response and resolution, define what is covered, and spell out update and upgrade rights with clear escalation for critical issues. On the channel side, we structure reseller, distributor, value-added, and referral arrangements that fix scope, margins, sales and marketing duties, certification, customer handoff, and performance and termination rights, so you expand reach without losing control of how your product is represented.

Open Source, Escrow, And Cross-Border Deals

Almost every codebase pulls in open source, so we help you understand permissive versus copyleft obligations, run audits, build compliance programs, and clean up issues that surface in deals or disputes. We structure source code escrow that gives customers real continuity protection while staying acceptable to vendors. And for cross-border transactions we address governing law, dispute resolution, export controls, data localization, and local registration so the deal works wherever it operates.

Frequently asked questions

A perpetual license gives you indefinite use rights for a one-time fee. A subscription requires ongoing payments to keep using the software. Which one fits depends on how you want to use the software and how you'd rather handle the cost, upfront capital versus a recurring expense.

Not automatically. Without clear assignment language in the contract, the developer can keep ownership even though you paid for the work. We write the agreement so you own what you paid for, with a license back to any pre-existing background tools the developer reasonably needs to keep using.

It depends on how critical the system is. For mission-critical software, 24/7 coverage with a one-to-four-hour response on critical issues is typical. For less critical tools, business-hours support with next-day response is usually fine and keeps costs in check.

Audit rights are common in software contracts. We help you respond to an audit, work through any compliance gaps it turns up, and negotiate audit clauses up front that balance the vendor's interests against reasonable limits on disruption to you.

Open source comes with license conditions, and some of them can require you to disclose your own source code or limit how you commercialize the product. The risk is manageable with a compliance process that tracks what licenses you're using and what each one requires, so you get the benefits without the surprises.

Escrow protects you if a vendor goes under or can no longer support the software, by holding the source code with a neutral third party that releases it under defined conditions. We negotiate the release triggers, the choice of escrow agent, and your right to verify that what's deposited actually builds and works.

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