Step 1. They'll announce that Facebook is going to invest in any Y Combinator companies that want to make their products work well with Facebook.

Step 2. They'll announce that Facebook will pre-acquire any Y Combinator companies without going through the trouble of demo day, angel investment, etc.

Step 3. Getting accepted to Y Combinator will mean automatically being acquired by Facebook. All Y Combinator founders will have guaranteed jobs at Facebook with 4 year vesting lockup.

Step 4. Paul and Jessica realize that there's no glory in being Facebook's unpaid campus recruiters, but unfortunately, their own vesting deal will require them to hang around pretending to be friends with Mark Zuckerberg for another 13 months.

You think this is a good thing, but it's not. Instead of setting a simple price based on what Tarsnap is worth to people --- a task that requires figuring out what Tarsnap is worth to different people and selecting the segment of the market that(a) you want to serve and (b) is sufficiently lucrative --- you have a fundamentally cost-based micro-metering structure that almost certainly radically undercharges most of your users.

You may think you're doing your users a favor by letting them off easy. But you're not. If Tarsnap is worth $11/mo to most of your users (hint: it is) and you charge $10/mo, you're generating value for them. But instead of doing that, you charge them almost nothing, and as a result are much more limited in what you can do for them. Last I checked, you were consulting instead of full-timing Tarsnap.

If you charged more, you could afford to:

* Radically overhaul your website and educate users about what secure backup actually means

* Commission a better user interface for people who you'd like to offer secure backup to but can't because they're not going to use a Unix command-line tool

* Implement more and better features on the backend of your system for tracking data, scheduling backups, backing up different kinds of data, and whatnot

This is all apart from the obvious point that your micro-metered pricing scheme is a Mensa test that almost makes fun of people's attempts to figure out what your service costs. Yes, the fact that it costs much too little means the joke is on you, but that doesn't really take the sting out of it for your prospective customers.

I highly doubt he's "ignorant" of anything when it comes to Python...

A better theory is this article is from 2003, but the ast module was added in Python 2.6, which was released in 2008.

(I agree with everything you've said in the second and third paragraphs, but, man, try to give people a little credit before you assume they're ignorant, 'k?)

Innovation has no value to the public if you don't produce and ship a good product. In my opinion the company that actually ships something should always have the upper hand because it's good for consumers. Patent reform should follow a use-it-or-lose-it model. If a company comes up with an innovative idea, ships a product, and that product stays on the market (in one form or another) for many years they probably deserve to own the patent. If people are buying it then it must be halfway decent. If they never produce a shipping product they shouldn't be able to hold the patent hostage. If they decide to stop selling a product that uses the patent someone else should have the opportunity to dust it off.