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Mythic Sues Microsoft Over Mythica MMORPG
An anonymous reader writes "Mythic Entertainment, developers of PC MMO videogame Dark Age of Camelot, has filed suit against Microsoft, arguing that Microsoft's upcoming MMORPG Mythica is too similar in name and content (it 'also employs Norse images and mythology') to its own name and flagship title. Maybe if game developers could dream up a genre other than fantasy, problems like this would be averted..."
You're hatin' on the Masons there buddy. And where be da carpenters at yo?
Why? They feel that it's basically the same thing. This crowd doesn't like to think it is, but it probably is. If this works for Mythic then it pretty much validates Microsoft's claims over Lindows, assuming there wasn't enough precedent to begin with.
It always works both ways.
Microsoft didn't invent the operating system, didn't invent the GUI, nor did they invent the word processor, or the spreadsheet or the database. They didn't even invent the idea of an "integrated" package. Almost none of Microsoft's products have ever had even a tiny shred of originality or innovation, not even their first product, their BASIC interpreter for the Altair.
This may come as a surprise to many Microsoft fanboys, but Bill Gates didn't invent BASIC, that was invented by two Dartmouth professors about 10 years before Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their interpreter for the Altair. For that matter, Bill Gates had worked on a similar BASIC interpreter for the DEC minicomputers while he was an intern at Digital before he wrote Altair BASIC, and Altair BASIC was quite similar to DEC BASIC.
Many of the products which Microsoft is famous for weren't even originally written by Microsoft, they were purchased from other companies or Microsoft absorbed other companies to get them. Examples would be MS-DOS and Visual BASIC. That's right, Visual BASIC was purchased, not developed originally within Microsoft Furthermore, for example, MS-DOS's direct predecessor QDOS was a direct clone of CP/M. Windows certainly wasn't the first GUI (see Apple), in fact it wasn't even the first GUI shell that ran on top of MS-DOS.
That, plus the whole Internet Explorer fiasco we all can remember.
It's no surprise they can't even invent original RPGs. I hope they get sued into the ground this time around, especially considering their past history of getting away with stealing everyone else's work through strongarm tactics.
And of course, the only reason that the name "Lindows" was chosen was to make it sound like Linux Windows, and Windows is quite clearly a Microsoft product. Duh.
You GNU folks are really making open-source look bad by continuing to harp on this. Lindows was an attempt to piss off Microsoft. Period. Get over it.