Do you remember this scenario from days of yore?

• Company A buys a software license from Company B, a startup.
• Company A crosses its fingers that Company B doesn’t go bankrupt and disappear, along with the source code for Company A’s mission-critical software.
• Company B goes kaput.
• Company A is left with some machine-readable binary code that it is powerless to develop or use.

Source code escrow has changed the outcome of this…

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From time to time, users on the Lucene mailing list ask a variant of the following question:

Given a term match in a document, what’s the best way to get a window of words around that match?

Getting a window of words around a match can be useful for a lot of things, including, to name a few:

1. Highlighting (although I’d recommend using Lucene’s Highlighter package for that)
2. Co-occurrence analysis
3. Sentiment analysis
4. Question Answering

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