I've had some software developed, now the coder is holding me for ransom.
gojomo: It's a bad working relationship, you have to end it. The only question is how to salvage something.If you've paid for work so far, and your contract gave you rights to the source code, demand the source code. You could hand that to another developer and it might be of some use.If he won't provide it, and especially if he's local, sue in small claims court for your money back.If you have a running version without source, you could rebid this elsewhere and use both your previous correspondences and the working version itself as a new spec to accelerate the new work.If it's truly $2K worth of work by an ornery contractor, it can likely be reproduced for about the same cost. But it's also possible that he was way undercharging you and that's why he's become ornery.If you have a working code delivery but not source, Java code can be decompiled to recover somewhat useful source code. However, unless there's some fancy custom algorithms/graphics/etc. in your app, a basic 'Swing desktop app' might be easier for a new contractor to build from scratch in their style than try to reuse something from an unreliable coder. Only go the decompilation route if you are confident of your rights to the work (because it was clearly a work-for-hire with you receiving the rights under your written contract, and you haven't orally modified that contract in your pleadings with the developer).Rentacoder and other sites really help prevent a lot of these problems by nudging people -- especially those new to software development -- into doing things the right way... having a clear contract, planning for likely delays, staging things, getting multiple bids for comparison, etc.