Someone copied my game!

Last September, I wrote in this post about someone who copied the "ABC123" open source game, changed the background colour plus a few minor stuffs, and then publish the whole game as his. Today, I found it happened to me too!!!

I first noticed this "Dice in Cup" game a few days ago, as below, it's published on 21st Dec 2011.

I played with it for a while and noticed strong similarity with my "Dice in Cup" open source game published on 15th November 2011. If you look at the screen dump below and compare with the video I posted in this post, you will notice other than the image difference, the font, the label, the location of the label, even the points you gain after passing each level is exactly the same!

Even the name of app after installed, the one to the left is his, the one to the right is mine, is exactly the same! There's a few "..." in the middle because I called my game a very long name: "Cocos2dDiceInCup":

To further clarify, I use the method I mentioned in this post to inspect the ".ipa" file after sync with a Windows machine. As shown below, the name is indeed "Cocos2dDiceInCup"!

After renamed it to ".zip" and expanded, the content is shown below, although he did add quite a few image/music/sound files, he didn't even delete my 2 old image files: "rockImage.png" and "seeker.png"!

As shown below from my published source, those 2 image files are there.

Ok, so based on my investigation, this guy copied my whole game, added some sound and music, added a background image, changed the cup/dice image and added a starting page.

[Update 10/02/2012] After some further study, looks like I have to admit I didn't have enough understanding of Open Source at the beginning.

My main purpose of sharing was simply to help others to learn - like so many others who have helped me in the past. And I naively thought that everyone will have similar thinking - to appreciate others' generosity, to respect others' intellectual property, and also somehow contribute back to the community to make it even better.

Unfortunately, there's always some people who would simply tastelessly copy everything and then publish it without giving any credit to the original creator. This really hurts my feeling, and I will certainly think twice before publishing anything... Sad... :-(

[Update 11/04/2012] This issue has been on my mind for a while. After calmed down a bit, I think it's me who is the silly one - who didn't fully understand the meaning of Open Source at the beginning, then probably felt hurt as others published something before me using my code (I still haven't publish anything yet :-( ...), thus came up with all these negative stuffs.

But hey, that's Open Source! You suppose to feel proud that someone did copy your stuff as that would be some sort of "recognition"!

My apology if my negative feeling caused any confusion or hurt any one. Was thinking of deleting this/previous post, but on second thought, decide to leave it as a reminder - to show what sort of dumb mistake I have made - released code as Open Source and then criticise others for copying it.... Silly me...

Posted in: license,open source game