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I'm imagining some world where patent troll-equivalents crawl the web for abandoned experiments that could serve as fodder for lawsuits. I agree with the sentiment that companies shouldn't brick products with code changes but worry about the downstream effects.

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Thing is there's is already plenty of open source code out there written by people of very varied means. As far as I know patent troll like behavior is not a major problem for open source, so I don't see why it would magically become the case.

This is a great example.

I'm not saying that the behavior Sonos engaged in here is good - I'm just saying that jumping to "it should be illegal" so quickly without considering all of the secondary impacts is a mistake.

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