This move strikes me as a truce agreement proposed by someone with no sword.
How many technology patents does Twitter even HAVE, not counting Loren Brichter's "pull-to-refresh" UI innovation?
One of the most valuable coding tools that I learned to appreciate relatively late in my coding career is the Thesaurus. Not only because I'm not native English. Finding the right identifiers is often surprisingly hard, and seeing synonyms and antonyms of the concept you try to express, all of which have some different connotations and slightly different meanings can actually help you to sort out your own thinking quite a bit.
And if you try to have your variable names describe what you are doing as best as possible, and you find you run out of names, or the same name can mean very different things in your code, then you probably have some big conceptual problems.