To be clear, I (like many of you) have poured countless hours into John Carmack's games, and stand in awe of his work. I also have considerably less capability

To be clear, I (like many of you) have poured countless hours into John Carmack's games, and stand in awe of his work. I also have considerably less capability than most HN users in programming, etc. So I may have a large pro-Carmack bias going into this... Having said that, the concept of "non-literal copying" is, IMHO, nonsense. And dangerous. So I'll agree with Carmack on that much. And while I don't know (I don't think it's been revealed, although I haven't been following the case closely), it seems that Carmack had some hand in writing the original code, so of course the code will have similarities. Also, the analogy of "Harry Potter with the names changed" is, from what I can tell, a pretty bad one for what actually happened. In short, I think this is pretty much nonsense. OTOH, Zenimax does have so evidence of wrongdoing on Carmack's part, so it's not like their case has no basis, and I am inclined to be biased toward Carmack. And there's always the possibly that I have no idea what I'm talking about and I'm just stark raving mad.