True Software Ownership Means Anyone Can Run It, Not Just Who Built It

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A small studio founder argues that software ownership has three distinct layers: legal, custodial, and operational, yet most contracts only address the legal one. A common failure point is that products run on cloud, domain, and app store accounts registered to the builder rather than the client, making handovers difficult and slow. The author recommends that all accounts be created by the client organisation from day one, with the development team invited in rather than the other way around. To verify genuine operational ownership, they suggest a practical test: hand the repository and access list to someone unfamiliar with the project and ask them to get it running, deploy it, and ship a change within a single day. This exercise reliably surfaces undocumented environment variables, manual migration steps, and locally stored credentials that would otherwise block any future team.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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