At one stage a company I worked for was considering licensing the code for a school time-tabling application, rather than paying the company to do the (fairly minor) changes we required to meet (non-USA) state requirements. The company was started by a couple of teachers, the same people who wrote their product. It was 10s of ks of Pascal code, but with not a single variable name or function name that made any sense; everything was A, AA, AA1, X, XX, XX2 etc. I spent a few days looking at it, then recommended we keep paying the somewhat steep cost for the modifications. Then at least if anything broke it was on them to fix it.

Incidentally we had a small falling out with this company, and they were refusing to update their executable until this issue was resolved. This looked like affecting some hundreds of schools and their timetables. I did some checking, and it turned out their 'non-updated' executable was doing a simple date check on the local PC; if it was past a certain date, the executable refused to run. So I did a quick hack in our application that involved: - setting the local PC date to prior to the 'cutoff date' - running their executable with the required parameters, and grabbing the results - setting the local PC date back correctly

This led to interesting negotiations as they were puzzled why their 'gun to our heads' no longer appeared to be working, and things were resolved to the benefits of both parties soon after.