Typically when a reporter or even customer asks you what happens if you go out of business, your gut reaction is to get a little bit defensive. That said, our current economy is, in some ways, suffering because a lot of dreamers didn’t prepare for the possibility of failure. When we started thinking about our company from a customer’s standpoint, we agreed that something needed to be done to ensure Pogoplug would be useful with or without our support. Our goal is to take responsibility - in advance- for our product and our consumers in the unlikely event that we don’t succeed.

So, to all of those people that asked (and even those who wondered but didn’t voice it), “What happens if Pogoplug goes out of business?” we now have an answer: we empower the community and our customers to be self-sufficient. We have created an Escrow Account that holds the source code for Pogoplug’s back-end services. In the unlikely event of our bankruptcy, our source code will be published on SourceForge for the community to manage how they see fit.

This means other programmers, companies, or organizations can have complete access to rebuild and maintain the necessary servers to keep Pogoplugs working. Our community has been insightful enough to ask these imperative questions and challenge us to think outside of our paradigm, so we know that our community is the most responsible benefactor.

We are big fans of supporting the open source community, and feel this move is good for the community *and* our customers. We’ve seen user communities grow healthy and independent through their passionate user communities and we know that our most prized possession will be in great hands if anything should happen to our beloved company.