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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised nobody has written an emacs mode for "syntax control"

... yet

Time to extend writegood-mode (https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode) to use NSLinguisticTagger (http://nshipster.com/nslinguistictagger/ and of course https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...).

This raises a larger question about patents in software. If I can anonymously create a program or feature that violates a patent, and release it to the wild as free and open...the patent holders have nobody to go after.

They can go after everyone who downloads it, because they will be violating the patent too.

So then you need to write a virus to infect people's machines with this useful software. Plausible deniability for the end users.

Haha, and then you wind up looking like the RIAA, suing your hoped-for audience. Only tone-deaf execs and greedy lawyers would sue their audience members.

And before you say, "but they were stealing and so weren't going to be part of the audience." I'm well aware of that, but the reality is that you're drawing out the ire of folks from amongst your hoped for audience. Just not a good plan.

the fact that it's not a good plan hasn't stopped others from doing it. It's not much of a comfort to know that the person ergo who sued you made a bad business move.

The end-game for this scenario is for the whole package to provide enough polish and other features that you'd be stupid to cobble together the OSS equivalents after you reached a certain level of affluence. And then it's the business' job to make sure they can profit off that audience division. Good companies understand that and don't waste their time with needless software patents. Poorly run companies insist that "it's mine, you can't have it" and wind up stirring up trouble from amongst their user base.

Of course, it would seem iA is in the later category. Hopefully they've done some market analysis that they still have a critical audience mass who are either ignorant/apathetic to such tactics and buy it anyway.

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