In intellectual property law you have a few different concepts including:
- copyright
- trademarks
- patents
Copyright law would generally prohibit ripping off the original assets from another game or copying their code, but it would to my understanding not prevent anyone from making a “clone” of another game as long as the assets and the code are your own. And as long as those assets of yours are actually distinct looking and not the same look or too similar to the original, and your code is your own and not something you wrote by reverse engineering the code of the original yourself. Also there is a concept called “clean room implementation” that is sometimes used where they do reverse engineer other people’s code, but the person or people doing the reverse engineering and the person or people implementing the clone are separate people and the people implementing it only look at documentation from the people that reverse engineered it without looking at any of the reverse engineered code itself.
Trademark law might prevent you from using the name “Breakout” in the name of your clone, if there is a trademark on that. On the other hand, if there was a trademark but the name has become a generic word for the thing, the holders of the original trademark might not be able to prevent you from using the name even so. I have not looked into the trademark status of “Breakout”.
Software patents might prevent you from copying mechanics from a game. For example if there is a patent relating to how Breakout works. I haven’t looked into whether there are any patents on that, as I am not planning to publish any Breakout clone myself.
I assumed that the game was so old the concept was up for grab, but there might be some obscure patent. Given how many successful commercial games were made based on this concept, I'd assume the patent trolls would have killed the genre if there were any with valid patents to show. I might be wrong ^^
Indeed! This is an age-old method, this is what a dandy horse is for! In France, and surely many other places, you see the kids of young age on dandy horses ("draisiennes") coming to and from the school supervised by their parents. As a rite of passage towards the bicycle :)
In France and Belgium, Decathlon makes neat bikes with pedals that can be taken off easily and properly (including the cranks) turning them into a "normal" draisienne.
This means the kids can easily try it with pedals on, take them off again if it doesn't work, etc, and it looks less like a "baby bike" (which matters for some kids). I think they're really nice.
Yes, I’m surprised that this is apparently something new for Americans. I thought that was a basic kids toy that’s common everywhere, like skipping ropes or slides.
Both my kids learned on a "draisienne" and they hoped on a regular bike like it was nothing the first day they got it.
Kids in the neighborhood who didn't learn on a draisienne, but instead got small wheels, really struggled with balance, and some are still scared to ride their bikes to this day (I'm talking 5-9 years old kids), while my kids are riding with no hands.
I don't know if it's enough to see a pattern, but I'm convinced :)
These were around in the US back in the day, but known by the name "hobby horse." Relatively few of them survived, but I've seen them in a few collections in my travels, chiefly the Bicycle Museum of America in New Bremen, OH...which I highly recommend visiting if you happen to be passing by. Pretty neat bit of history and I'd love to try and make one with wooden wheels one day.
I think that "people who did hard things" fall on a spectrum between these two extremities:
- someone who got lucky
- someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs
Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum.
--
Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.
The books about people who did hard things and spent an unfathomable amount of time on them, but failed and never became known for anything--generally don't get written. It's hard for me to take any "hard work success story" as prescriptive. It's mostly survivorship bias.
Is there a crowd-sourced list of IPs of known bots? I would say there is an interest for it, and it is not unlike a crowd-source ad blocking list in the end.
In the past I have been training in a coding "bootcamp" for a while. I insisted that people new to coding use a plain text editor, like Notepad on Windows, no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete, nothing, and a command line to lint and compile the code. I only introduced the IDEs much much later, closer to the end of the bootcamp. First, I confirm that it is perfectly possible to complete rather complex projects this way. Secondly, I have no ground truth to compare my results with, but I know that most of the students appreciated the fact that they do not depend on the IDE/LSP/Copilot that much and developed their own understanding of how the things work.
I don't advocate to do the same outside of the learning process, of course. The tools help a lot (in fact, LSPs are awesome), but there are two principles that are important here I think:
- having an understanding of the underlying code, language, etc.
- being intentional about the use of the tools (e.g., invoking auto-complete with a keystroke vs an endless suggestions list; running a linter explicitly vs a code bloated with "insights" and "warning highlights", etc.)
(Not buzzkilling anything, just genuinely curious.)
reply