Everyone's being diplomatic, including most of the HN comments.

This seems to be the simplest compromise, and allows OpenTTD to continue existing without too many problems from Atari, so people don't want to make waves.

There is no way not to, OpenTTD has 0 cards to play since everything is explicitly build on IP that is not theirs, and they know it. They were "not pressured" because Atari didn't utter threats to them, it didn't need to come to that because the OpenTTD people were reasonable, and so was Atari.

Not sure why so many commenters are failing to grasp this.

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it is neither being delisted, nor was it requested to be. As far as rights holders exercising their rights, this is about the most collaborative way it could have gone. Not every rights holder is a John Carmack.

Agreed. Publishers need to be knocked off this absurd moral high ground. If merely being rich is enough for me to profit off of Miles Davis songs for decades after his death, copyright is just another wealth redistribution to the rich. Steal all the games and music, and any ghoul that claims I’m stifling creativity can compare their compositions to mine.

> They had nothing to do with developing the game

OpenTTD started as an effort to translate the original game’s assembly into higher level code.

It was not a clean room implementation. The original code was used as a base.

> in a sane copyright structure

You are not wrong. But alas we don't have that. ANd in the reality we live in this collaboration is way better than the alternative.

Well, they shouldn't be entitled but they are entitled.

But it's not and we don't live in fantasy land. Your approach would have it shut down tomorrow.

You’re going to brute force every possible state of a sandbox building game. See you on the other side of the heat death of the universe; hope you stocked up on Claude Code credits.

Why would you when an open source version already exists?

So https://malus.sh/

Good luck with all that