Intellectual property protection suddenly stops. What do software developers do?

[LDiCesare]

If you want a listing, there are many open source MUDs. There are also several Roguelikes, including NetHack, Slash'em, ADOM, gazillions of variants of Moria and Angband.
All these games are large and complex.
To this you may add others like FreeCiv, c-evo, BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, TORCS, and probably others but the genres I am interested in don't count that many commercial games either...

There are also many games that you'll get only through the web (spiderwebsoftware) for which IP isn't that much of a concern, since I doubt such a game lacks money because of piracy, but rather because they don't get a distributor, and who manage identification without requiring the CD to be in.
Multiplayer games (or games which are mostly aimed at MP, like Dominions II) also don't need more than a serial number to protect themselves effectively (no need for a CD if 2 people with the same serial number can't play together on 2 computers).

[Kuciwalker]

If you want a listing, there are many open source MUDs. There are also several Roguelikes, including NetHack, Slash'em, ADOM, gazillions of variants of Moria and Angband.
All these games are large and complex.

Are you sure it helps your case that open source is good at creating MUDs? God help us then if we eliminate IP...

To this you may add others like FreeCiv, c-evo, BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, TORCS, and probably others but the genres I am interested in don't count that many commercial games either...

FreeCiv wouldn't have existed without Civ...

[LDiCesare]

Yes freeciv wouldn't have existed without civ, but most games borrow from other games. But then, Diablo II creators explicitly said they took ideas from NetHack and ADOM. It is natural that games borrow from other games - chess is quite popular as a computer game for instance. And MUD's are the ancestors of MMORPGs (yes way way way cruder, still the idea was there).

As for IP, I have a problem with it only insofar as it hinders legitimate customers (having the CD in the drive is a pain and sometimes the CD-recognition fails, particularly if you're running an old game through DOSbox). Look at this http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...retly_i_1.html if you want to see an example of IP protection going too far (though in this case it's music, but you could imagine similar methods of 'protecting' software). When the protection hurts the customer, it's a good idea to find better ways to handle it.

[Kuciwalker]

Yes freeciv wouldn't have existed without civ, but most games borrow from other games. But then, Diablo II creators explicitly said they took ideas from NetHack and ADOM. It is natural that games borrow from other games - chess is quite popular as a computer game for instance.

The difference is that FreeCiv is, IIRC (I played it a long time ago), almost an exact copy of Civ2.

And MUD's are the ancestors of MMORPGs (yes way way way cruder, still the idea was there).

So?