I think this is a subset of the fifth (of the seven) ideals of local-first software https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/#5-the-long-now

> Local-first software enables greater longevity because your data, and the software that is needed to read and modify your data, are all stored locally on your computer.

There are many ways to achieve this goal - open document standards, open source servers, a escrowed release of the server, or this idea of a bail out system for taking the current version and self hosting it. All are commendable.

Actually achieving all seven ideals is hard, and there isn't much modern software that does it. But in my view anyone trying to achieve even a few of the ideals is making strides towards a worthy goal.

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the local-first software movement at the moment, and a lot of that is related the sync engines that are being built (disclaimer: I work for ElectricSQL, we are building one). These sync engine don't inherently make your software local-first, fitting all the ideals, but they do make it a lot easer to do so. They are an important building block. But there is more needed, we need more open document standards - Automerge, Yjs, Loro and the other CRDT data structures are perfect lower level data structures to build these higher level abstractions on. Martin Kleppmann has talked quite a bit about sync engines that are disconnected from the underlying application, essentially pluggable sync engine, you choose who to use to sync you copy of a document or application - I'm excited to see where this goes.

But, we also need to free up the application distribution platform. The app stores are walled gardens that prevent some business models, native apps (while performant) are tied to a specific platform (or even version!), and the web is inherently tied to servers and browsers. The web platform though, i.e. JS, HTML, CSS, is perfect for building high longevity software that runs anywhere, on any device, the issue is the distribution. We need a middle ground, an application package that built on web standards, but isn't tied to a server. I want to download a bundled app to my machine and have a copy, email to a family member, or even open and hack on it. Thats the final missing piece.

A downloadedable app, with an open and pluggable sync engine would achieve the same goles of this ejectable idea.

Local-First and Ejectable