>I wouldn't recommend anybody to actually try to decipher/deploy Konfig for their own use.

This is interesting. I used to work for a mortgage start-up years ago. They built several products for banks and home builders, such as a mortgage vault and tools for signing mortgage documents online.

One condition I still remember was that bank customers required us to put our code in escrow, held by lawyers, in case the company went under. I always wondered if customers could rebuild the code, allocate more resources to develop and maintain it, or simply look for an alternative solution.

they came to us for our solution. I assumed they either couldn’t build it themselves or didn’t want to invest in a custom solution.

i have been involved in quite a few code escrow agreements but none that were actually used. i'd be curious to hear any stories about cases where that did happen.

in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup

I imagine that it is for either insurance or regulatory reasons. Someone upstream is nervous about the bank relying on a startup for its core infrastructure, and is only placated by knowing that the code is in escrow. They're not themselves programmers and don't know how useless the code would be without the institutional knowledge of the startup.