Neat! Is there a way to tell the backend "run this bytecode, please"? If there is sqlite would make a great test bed to try out new query languages. Or, inversely, you could write a distributed database whose wire protocol was sqlite bytecode. Or you could write code translator to let you run sqlite queries on hadoop.
"Berkeley DB is not exposed to the end-user. It is totally hidden below the SQLite APIs. It acts as the storage engine in place of SQLite's own BTREE. An application written to use the SQLite version 3 API can switch to Oracle Berkeley DB with no code changes, simply re-link against Berkeley DB."
SQLite is even recommended[1] (granted, by the authors) as a testbed for SQL extensions. While an entirely new query language would obviously be a lot more work, I don't see why it wouldn't be an equally good choice.
If they did try to charge for the games they would get enough chargebacks that they would have a hard time processing credit card payments for a while. And with chargeback penalties they might actually lose money.
The only sensible options are a) do nothing or b) revoke games purchased with these codes. If I were them I would do nothing and treat it as an unplanned pricing experiment. Since a lot of these games have an online component (network effects!) the "giveaways" might increase real sales overall.
Even if that's the case, it would be unwise for EA to pursue this money. All anyone would have to do is issue a chargeback - which by the way incurs penalty fees for EA. More than that, it costs $25 for EA to file a challenge to a chargeback, making it completely not worthwhile.
Going after this money would be a PR disaster, a legal quagmire, financially negative in all likelihood, and permanently damage their relationship with their payment processors.
I would instead invest more money in hiring proper architects.
Ugh, now we're going to have to stretch our already practically non-existant political capital even further to defend against this shit. Do the CCC and the Pirate Party have official positions on this?
Edit: In case they don't (and that's what it looks like from some cursory googling), here are some talking points that might be effective. Disclaimer: I'm not European, so I probably have a bad intuition about what would play over there.
* This measure is a form of trade protectionism that will result in retaliation from the US (think import duities). That retaliation will harm EU companies more than American ones, since the US is far larger than any single market in the EU
* Many EU startups have grown in the US market first, even though they are based in the EU (soundcloud and last.fm come to mind). Higher costs across borders would at best limit new companies like these to their home markets and at worst kill them on the vine.
* Popular services like Google and Twitter (Facebook seems touchy, so I would leave them out) have no domestic alternatives, so jeopardizing access would harm consumers.
Imagine what kinds of tools you could write if you had a giant corpus of schematics and edit histories. "Find a path through the graph of existing parts to wire these parts together" would be one example.
Means it's more than three times what you were thinking would be affordable. Also, they don't want your business. They want a design consultant's businesss, so the price can be a small part of a huge contract.
