4 ms·

Note that, while it is a rewrite, it was done so through disassembling the original game, not via a clean room implementation. I find this particularly relevant

by jorl17 7mo ago

Note that, while it is a rewrite, it was done so through disassembling the original game, not via a clean room implementation. I find this particularly relevant given that the original was written (mostly) in assembly too.

Closi 7mo ago
Also even if it is a ground up rewrite, the look and feel still matters. Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)
- anthk 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bjt 7mo ago
    The fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.
    - anthk 7mo ago
      Sony vs Bleem. They already lost this case in court.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - comex 7mo ago
        That was a very different case. Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here. The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent. If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
        anthk 7mo ago
        FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD at first when every BSD OS was just part of 386BSD it used to have AT&T code. That code was rewritten replacing every propietary part and after that (and noticing BSD 4.4 was incomplete) we got clean FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD from a NetBSD fork. Another similar case with exact grounds was GNU which with Linux it completed an OS albeit in a hacky way, because the original OS would have been GNU+Hurd, but both are reimplementing Unix. Same SH derived shell, but extended. Kinda like OpenTTD. We have GNU Coreutils, Findutils, GNU AWK reimplementing and extending AWK (even when AWK was propietary), GNU Zip, Tar... the list goes on and on. Oh, another one: Lesstif vs Motif. Same UI, if not very, very close to Motif 1.2 in order to be interoperable. Today it doesn't matter because nearly a decade a go Motif was relicensed into the GPL, but tons of libre software depending on propietary Motif was just seamlessly running with LessTIF libraries except for some rough edges/bugs. One of the most known example was DDD, a GUI for GDB.
  - InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
    I think I'm even older than you, because I remember what Nintendo did to the Great Giana Sisters.
    - anthk 7mo ago
      And later the DOS PC world spawned several Mario clones as legal shareware.
  - haunter 7mo ago
    Good luck making an open source Pokemon game clone and see how it goes
    - anthk 7mo ago
      Tuxemon. And before that, several more a few decades ago.
  - dang 7mo ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anthk 7mo ago
  - OpenArena - Chip's Challange and custom levels pack - Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic - LibreQuake - Supertux2 - Oolite - Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets - Frozen Bubble - Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.
  - Closi 7mo ago
    This list might just be survivor bias though - it only includes the projects where they didn’t get sued and taken down (either because the developer was ok with them, or because they strayed far enough into fair use). There are clear counter examples - see Tengen vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Palworld, Microsoft vs halo inspired games, Microsoft vs Minecraft clones. Most are settled out court. Examples that go to court tend to be from companies with budgets to fight, lots of projects will just get DMCA’d and won’t fight, or will back down after a legal letter. Ultimately copyright and IP infringement is decided in the courts, and the rules aren’t entirely black and white.
    - anthk 7mo ago
      The actual list at https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com it's so huge that literally invalidates any point stated by HN commenters ignoring that, yes, Giana Sisters for the C64 was taken down but after that several Mario shareware clones existed for PC and a few years later we even got Supertux and, in the 2000's, Secret Maryo Chronicles which got renamed in order to avoid any issues with "Mario" as a TM, but the gameplay was 99% the same of Super Mario World. On software recreating something propietary: - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... vs AT&T Unix. - GNU+Linux or GNU+Hurd against propietary Unix kernels. - Coreutils+Findutils+Sharutils... every tool reimplemented being propietary. - Bash, GAWK, GCC, binutils, Clisp, SBCL, GNU GCJ+Classpath, Red, FreePascal+Lazarus, GNUStep+WMaker, LessTif, EMWM+Motif vs Irix' Maxx Desktop (still propietary, and from the 90's) Gaim, AMSN, 7zip, Haxima+Nahzgul (and Ultima it's still being sold at GOG), Supertux2, Supertuxkart, ReTux (very Wario like), Hexoshi (Metroid), SMC (Super Mario World), Pingus (Lemmings), XMMS/Xine cloning WinAmp and maybe PowerDVD (Xine with skins), WordTsar for Wordstar, Nano for propietary Pico (and Alpine for propietary Pine), BSD vi and Amiga vim for maybe propietary vi under AT&T/commercial Unix, Lincity and Lincity-NG for Simcity, FreeCiv against Civilization (it can use both the OG Civ rules and their custom ones), Frozen Bubble (I think the level set it's from the Neo Geo release), KGoldrunner and such for Lode Runner, Kapman for Pacman, every BSD shipping Tetris and Boggle, GNU Octave for Matlab.... The list example for both software and games being just reimplementation/clones of propietary tools goes on an on. Even DOS had propietary clones which had to reimplement the same interface as MSDOS because if not the tools written for it would just crash. Same commands, same output, same formating tools, same memory layout, they ran the same DOS binaries and drivers...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- 20k 7mo ago
  Clean room reimplementations of software projects have been tested in court and are legally fine
  - ikiris 7mo ago
    Software projects that do things like edit spreadsheets, transform data, do calculations, yes. Software projects that are themselves a type of art that is itself copyrighted, lol no.
    - anthk 7mo ago
      Eh, that's a bit of bullshit; I've seen floss Mario/Puzzle Bubble/Pang and such since forever and no one was sued. Heck, back in the day Rogue was propietary and commercial (and thanks to that we got both the roguelike genre and the Curses library) and yet Hack was born as a libre clone and from Hack we got the now uber known Nethack and forks like Slashem. Cloning commercial games it's older than Windows 95 itself and probably as old as the NES. The https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com has so many examples that you whole point gets invalidated since the first Hack release for Unix. And Tetris for Terminals, MSDOS and the like. Hell, in the 90's everyone in Europe (children of blue collar workers) got a Russian Tetris clone -oh the irony- called Brick Game with often several micro low-res commercial game clones such as for Frogger and Battle Tank. No one sued that company ever, even if the Tetris concept itself was for sure patented and copyrighted. And that game was probably sold by millions, maybe even more than the Game Boy if we count every clone sold with different plastic cases, because you could get one for the price of a book and today for less than a fast food ration.
      - Closi 7mo ago
        I don’t know if Tetris is the best example, as they are a landmark case where they sued and won. See Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc
- Suppafly 7mo ago
  >Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts That happens all the time, as long as you don't put their logos on your thing, there isn't shit they can do about it.
- tomik0091 7mo ago
  The maker movement died partly because the gap between "cool prototype" and "actual product people use" was too big. Vibe coding has the same risk but the gap is smaller. The biggest friction point right now isnt building, its deployment. Thats why I built vibmy.com where you paste code and its live in 5 seconds. If we can keep shrinking that gap between idea and live product, vibe coding has a real shot at sticking around unlike 3d printing did

by jorl17 7mo ago

Closi 7mo ago

Also even if it is a ground up rewrite, the look and feel still matters. Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)

anthk 7mo ago
[flagged]
- bjt 7mo ago
  The fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    Sony vs Bleem. They already lost this case in court.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - comex 7mo ago
      That was a very different case. Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here. The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent. If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
      - anthk 7mo ago
        FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD at first when every BSD OS was just part of 386BSD it used to have AT&T code. That code was rewritten replacing every propietary part and after that (and noticing BSD 4.4 was incomplete) we got clean FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD from a NetBSD fork. Another similar case with exact grounds was GNU which with Linux it completed an OS albeit in a hacky way, because the original OS would have been GNU+Hurd, but both are reimplementing Unix. Same SH derived shell, but extended. Kinda like OpenTTD. We have GNU Coreutils, Findutils, GNU AWK reimplementing and extending AWK (even when AWK was propietary), GNU Zip, Tar... the list goes on and on. Oh, another one: Lesstif vs Motif. Same UI, if not very, very close to Motif 1.2 in order to be interoperable. Today it doesn't matter because nearly a decade a go Motif was relicensed into the GPL, but tons of libre software depending on propietary Motif was just seamlessly running with LessTIF libraries except for some rough edges/bugs. One of the most known example was DDD, a GUI for GDB.
- InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
  I think I'm even older than you, because I remember what Nintendo did to the Great Giana Sisters.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    And later the DOS PC world spawned several Mario clones as legal shareware.
- haunter 7mo ago
  Good luck making an open source Pokemon game clone and see how it goes
  - anthk 7mo ago
    Tuxemon. And before that, several more a few decades ago.
- dang 7mo ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
anthk 7mo ago
- OpenArena - Chip's Challange and custom levels pack - Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic - LibreQuake - Supertux2 - Oolite - Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets - Frozen Bubble - Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.
- Closi 7mo ago
  This list might just be survivor bias though - it only includes the projects where they didn’t get sued and taken down (either because the developer was ok with them, or because they strayed far enough into fair use). There are clear counter examples - see Tengen vs Nintendo, Nintendo vs Palworld, Microsoft vs halo inspired games, Microsoft vs Minecraft clones. Most are settled out court. Examples that go to court tend to be from companies with budgets to fight, lots of projects will just get DMCA’d and won’t fight, or will back down after a legal letter. Ultimately copyright and IP infringement is decided in the courts, and the rules aren’t entirely black and white.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    The actual list at https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com it's so huge that literally invalidates any point stated by HN commenters ignoring that, yes, Giana Sisters for the C64 was taken down but after that several Mario shareware clones existed for PC and a few years later we even got Supertux and, in the 2000's, Secret Maryo Chronicles which got renamed in order to avoid any issues with "Mario" as a TM, but the gameplay was 99% the same of Super Mario World. On software recreating something propietary: - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... vs AT&T Unix. - GNU+Linux or GNU+Hurd against propietary Unix kernels. - Coreutils+Findutils+Sharutils... every tool reimplemented being propietary. - Bash, GAWK, GCC, binutils, Clisp, SBCL, GNU GCJ+Classpath, Red, FreePascal+Lazarus, GNUStep+WMaker, LessTif, EMWM+Motif vs Irix' Maxx Desktop (still propietary, and from the 90's) Gaim, AMSN, 7zip, Haxima+Nahzgul (and Ultima it's still being sold at GOG), Supertux2, Supertuxkart, ReTux (very Wario like), Hexoshi (Metroid), SMC (Super Mario World), Pingus (Lemmings), XMMS/Xine cloning WinAmp and maybe PowerDVD (Xine with skins), WordTsar for Wordstar, Nano for propietary Pico (and Alpine for propietary Pine), BSD vi and Amiga vim for maybe propietary vi under AT&T/commercial Unix, Lincity and Lincity-NG for Simcity, FreeCiv against Civilization (it can use both the OG Civ rules and their custom ones), Frozen Bubble (I think the level set it's from the Neo Geo release), KGoldrunner and such for Lode Runner, Kapman for Pacman, every BSD shipping Tetris and Boggle, GNU Octave for Matlab.... The list example for both software and games being just reimplementation/clones of propietary tools goes on an on. Even DOS had propietary clones which had to reimplement the same interface as MSDOS because if not the tools written for it would just crash. Same commands, same output, same formating tools, same memory layout, they ran the same DOS binaries and drivers...
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
20k 7mo ago
Clean room reimplementations of software projects have been tested in court and are legally fine
- ikiris 7mo ago
  Software projects that do things like edit spreadsheets, transform data, do calculations, yes. Software projects that are themselves a type of art that is itself copyrighted, lol no.
  - anthk 7mo ago
    Eh, that's a bit of bullshit; I've seen floss Mario/Puzzle Bubble/Pang and such since forever and no one was sued. Heck, back in the day Rogue was propietary and commercial (and thanks to that we got both the roguelike genre and the Curses library) and yet Hack was born as a libre clone and from Hack we got the now uber known Nethack and forks like Slashem. Cloning commercial games it's older than Windows 95 itself and probably as old as the NES. The https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com has so many examples that you whole point gets invalidated since the first Hack release for Unix. And Tetris for Terminals, MSDOS and the like. Hell, in the 90's everyone in Europe (children of blue collar workers) got a Russian Tetris clone -oh the irony- called Brick Game with often several micro low-res commercial game clones such as for Frogger and Battle Tank. No one sued that company ever, even if the Tetris concept itself was for sure patented and copyrighted. And that game was probably sold by millions, maybe even more than the Game Boy if we count every clone sold with different plastic cases, because you could get one for the price of a book and today for less than a fast food ration.
    - Closi 7mo ago
      I don’t know if Tetris is the best example, as they are a landmark case where they sued and won. See Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc
Suppafly 7mo ago
>Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts That happens all the time, as long as you don't put their logos on your thing, there isn't shit they can do about it.
tomik0091 7mo ago
The maker movement died partly because the gap between "cool prototype" and "actual product people use" was too big. Vibe coding has the same risk but the gap is smaller. The biggest friction point right now isnt building, its deployment. Thats why I built vibmy.com where you paste code and its live in 5 seconds. If we can keep shrinking that gap between idea and live product, vibe coding has a real shot at sticking around unlike 3d printing did