Merchant Empires Creator on SM Brats

From Slashdot:


What Is A Clean Room Implementation? 7 
Posted by Cliff on Tuesday June 13, 2000 @01:34AM 
from the reverse-engineering dept. 
Bryan Brunton asks: 
"I am writing an open source game called Merchant Empires For now, it is
almost completely based on a closed source game called Space Merchant.
IMO, Space Merchant is slow, ugly, and bug-filled. I am getting Space
Merchant users who log into my game, spew some profanity and claim that
I will be sued. I have no access to Space Merchant source code. Can I be
sued? If so, what do I need to do to make my game qualify as a clean
room implementation?"



Don't let them worry you. (Score:1)
by yakfacts (201409) writes:            
                on Friday June 16, 2000 @07:28AM (#1006801) There were
                tons of Doom and Quake clones, and nobody cared.

I would suspect the people spewing profanity are 18 years old and need a
life. Don't let them worry you, as long as you don't have access to the
source. But make certain you dont disassemble the commerical code at
all.

Was not IE a clone of Netscape which was a dressed-up clone of Mosaic?
WordPerfect was pretty close to WordStar....