I got this anecdote first hand from a consultant who was working for Aerospace Maintenance when it happened (not the real company name, for liability issues).

Aerospace Maintenance decided to leverage a software solution called Avexus for its MRO (Maintenance Repair & Overhaul) application. Avexus was the leading commercial solution for MRO. Its vendor was offering the solution in ASP mode, which allowed Aerospace Maintenance not to worry about deployment, RDBMS maintenance, etc. The project, initiated in 2006, was deployed quickly and users were generally happy, although some last minute glitches created usage issues.

On October 16, Avexus’ web site vanished. On October 18, after unsuccessful attempts to contact Avexus, a visit to their San Diego offices found only vacant space. Aerospace Maintenance’s CIO reacted immediately, contacted the servers hosting provider and paid 3 months of hosting fees to keep the application running. He missioned a developer to recover sources and to ghost the server.

A few days later, Avexus’ web site was still down, and no information was available from any source until a press release was issued by an Indian company which announced they have acquired the IP assets (and only the IP assets) of Avexus. Aerospace Maintenance contacted this company, and was offered to re-pay for the sofware…

The sources recovered by Aerospace Maintenance were not up to date and could not be used.

Very few publicity was given to this story, because aerospace MRO companies could see their certification suspended should the FAA or the JAA found out that they had no control over such mission critical systems.

Scary, isn’t it? What if Avexus had been open source? Could this have happened? Maybe. With the same consequences for the users? Clearly not.

Yves