> We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

The guy agreed to this? Damn

There was a lot of legalese. But it boiled down to if he stopped working on it or got a hit by a bus.

Let me add on…we didn’t have exclusive rights to it nor could we redistribute the code or use it as the basis of an external product.