skotobaza

I can't find anything specific about how similar new binary should be to be to not get into trouble. For now it's probably case by case. You are correct that you can't legally redistribute unmodified binary.

I can only judge from the cases I know about regarding videogames. The two instances where publishers decided to intervene via a cease and desist letter or DMCA takedown: fan-made Metroid 2 remake (AM2R) and reverse engineering of GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas. Both Nintendo and Take-Two were making their own remakes of those games at the time, so they probably saw it as a threat to their profits.

But a lot of decompilations and ports have been made without any intervention from the publishers (at least from my knowledge). Diablo 1 has both a decompilation (code and exe) and a port. N64's Zeldas also have both, which is interesting since Nintendo is known for issuing DMCAs, and they also have a remake of Ocarina of Time currently in the works, so there should be enough reason to take down such projects (like they did with Metroid 2). I assume they are not doing anything because it's just the binary being distributed.

> Don't assume your readers know anything at all

But where do we stop? We can't assume everyone knows what an RTS is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer game is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer is (some people really don't know this).

You can see that this could quickly bloat the explanation.

I remember someone got frustrated on the article about ur-languages posted here on HN. He didn't know what ur-language is and didn't want to look it up by himself. I also didn't know the term, but I just went and googled it instead of berating the author of the article.

To my knowledge reverse engineering is legal (depends on jurisdiction of course). As is emulation. Which means there should be no legal issues with getting the source code of a binary executable, and then modifying it to work on another system.

A bit tangential, but you can also try to look at this logically. The number of instructions in the binary is limited. So the probability to get "substantially similar" binaries is higher than, say, with a book (for the same architecture of course). Plus as I mentioned, the videogame is not just a binary, it's also some assets with which the binary works. And we are not touching the assets since they are mostly independent of the architecture.

How is this piracy? You still need the game's other files (assets) to play the game. So you still need to buy the game.

What was stolen? We have a binary from which we can infer source code. But we do not posses the original source code. Why should it be illegal? You still need the game's assets.

With PDF the better analogy would be producing LaTeX file(s) that correspond to that PDF, without owning the original LaTeX file(s).

Is two years period supposed to be a lot? What if a person haven't played the game for five years (which happens quite often) then comes back and sees that it's gone?

> Don't purchase the game if the license terms aren't amenable to you

Unfortunately, terms can change. Publisher can promise 10-year support for the game and then drop it after 1 year. So when we purchase the game, we don't know what will happen in the future.

I'm in the same boat with the sibling comment. I currently play games that have been released 20+ years ago. In 20 years I want to be able to play the games that are being released now. That's what preservation is, not hoarding. Should I just stop playing older games because I wouldn't be able to play newer ones in some years? This seems entirely unreasonable to me. I can read books that have been written hundreds of years ago, I can watch movies that have been made 100 years ago. The same should be with video games. And it used to be this way.

I care about having access to my games 20 years from now. I've been playing more older games for the past few years (most of them were released 20+ years ago). And I want to be able to play games that are being released now and that I have missed because I was playing older games. It's a normal expectation.

> It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games

No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.

I don't see anyone (especially GingerBill) stating that article about Odin was deleted because of "political bias". The only thing I see is a general statement about Wikipedia being an "ideological playground". But I don't see that anyone thinks that people who removed the article were of the opposite views. The author makes the connection because of some Twitter accounts that GingerBill follows (and because of what he allegedly said in some videos), but I don't think it's a good proof, especially by the author's own standards.

But the goal of an encyclopedia is to inform people on things that it covers, isn't it? It's quite broad with Wikipedia but still... The language clearly exists, it's not a student project, it's is use, people are interested in it. So the page was created, but is now removed because of formalities (the lack of good enough sources).

The article was alright (with a weird tangent about gingers at the beginning), but then quickly devolved into personal attacks towards Odin's developer and Casey Muratori. Why? Just because they both wrote something on Twitter?

And then I read this:

> Steering a language and its context will naturally reflect the author's world view

> There are two ways one can "figure out a person" who rarely states their beliefs explicitly, specifically a public figure:

> 2. See who they follow on Twitter

What do someone's beliefs have to do with the development of a programming language? Or with its appearance on Wikipedia? Is this a normal world view?

Why wouldn't you want to have an article about a programming language that is currently used in production by someone? Are there any downsides to this?

> users can just upgrade

That used to work, but not anymore. Not because of hardware prices, but because of small gains that upgrading gets us nowadays.