Seems like not the best strategy seen from here ;-)
IANAL, but if you go out of business, at least over here clients GAIN the right to reverse engineer/decompile programs developed for them, as future maintainance will not be provided by you - probably some edge case law exists for your area. Steering away from such ideas seems more productive ;-)

Also the fact that your customers previously did not write the software themselves/did not pre-arrange a fixed option to buy the sources indivates for me that they did not want to maintain themselves - at least back a few years. Knowing nothing about your SW, clients and maintainance pattern/need, from the above it might be safer/smarter to sell your code and/or business to a maintainer.

The IP/rights question never will show its ugly head and it is probably less effort for you to introduce 1 new maintainer to all of your code compared to on-site maintainers with each client. If there is a growing or at least stable biz, you can phase out your work and get dividends for some more years - depends a lot on your replacement and contract. If the biz is dying, getting riches from clients now seems unethical.

So Bills 1$ less might be less if you just go out of biz, as rights might be forfeited ;-)

>I have been developing VFP/VPM apps for many years and wish to retire within the next 2 years. I have 2 large systems, Court and Foreclosure/Bankruptcy, and 8 smaller ones. I own the Source Code for all. The clients will need a new developer to maintain the systems and I would suggest to them to purchase the Source Code and let a new developer use it.
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>My question is what are your experiences/suggestions concerning the pricing of the code?
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>Bill