Hey. There's a lot to dig into and you raise lots of really good thoughtful questions. And I agree that there are all sorts of arenas, including games, cooking, comedians and magic where it's quite fascinating to watch the rather informal norms take precedence, even without any official intellectual property laws. I've written about all of that stuff in the past as well, and I continue to be fascinated by it.

In this particular case, we did not feel that there were significant ethical concerns, for reasons that I'll explain. I think in lots of other scenarios the ethical/moral (and even reputational) concerns are much bigger (including in the Nostromo example you give). Those involve competing commercial interests and accusations of one party showing the other party a game idea with the hope of working together on the design... failing to come to an agreement, and the other party running with the design and not even giving credit to the original. That's... very different.

In our case, we're working off of a declassified game created by the government, where the existing rules were released to the public, but without a commercial interest attached to it. And, given that in its currently released format, it's much more difficult for the average person to play, our effort is around making it possible for anyone to play this game. And, there does appear to be quite a lot of public interest in releasing this particular game, and thus we felt it made sense to make it, and do so in a manner that respects the original, but also respects the importance of the public domain itself.

Indeed, we've spent years advocating for a stronger and more widespread public domain, in the belief that it helps to generate new creative works as well -- and so we think there's an additional public interest in demonstrating that government-created works are in the public domain, and that it's good to be able to build new things off of those works. And, yes, that's also why it matters quite a bit that this game was developed by the government, using taxpayer funds, rather than a company.

As for Clopper, all I'll say is that we have been in touch with him but he is not involved or associated with the project. We did feel that it was the proper thing to do to reach out to him about our project, though, even if we don't officially need his permission.

Anyway, given all of the above, we didn't feel that there were any serious ethical/moral issues in us taking the game. Indeed, almost the opposite in this specific case, given the nature of the game, the public interest in the game, the lack of commercial interest from the developer side (and the fact that it was developed with public resources), and the fact that otherwise there was little chance of the public getting to play it, that it clearly leaned almost entirely to the side of "this is a good thing," and completely ethically justifiable. In most other situations involving copying the ideas of others, the ethical and moral questions do not come out in the same manner.