alt Hacker NewsAtari didn't put in the effort, but Chris Sawyer did. Now Atari paid Sawyer for the rights to the game. I do not think Atari is a parasite here just because they paid for the game instead of creating it.
It seems to me that the logical outcome of your interpretation is that Sawyer's leniency towards the OpenTTD devs would be punished by losing exclusivity to his IP. Essentially, you are asserting "squatter's rights" to IP - if IP rights are not enforced, then they lapse. This is an interesting idea in principle, but I'm concerned that it might have prevented OpenTTD from ever being created. Original creators would be incentivized to chase off derivative works to protect their IP.
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singpolyma3 • today at 12:46 AM
What "leniency"? It's not like OpenTTD contains any TTD IP
My issue with this argument is that I'm not sure how much of OpenTTD is their IP. OpenTTD has been development for so long that I doubt that any original disassembly remnants remain in the latest version of OpenTTD. The only true piece of IP that OpenTTD may use is the name (the TTD part of OpenTTD) and the graphics, the latter of which being the more important one. However, as far as I know, OpenTTD devs have created their own version of all the assets that are also much higher resolution compared to the original. As a result, I see OpenTTD as an entirely separate game, that's been heavily inspired by original, but is its own separate entity.