Good point! To respect EA's trademark and the terms of their modifications to the GPL-3 license regarding the use of their SimCity trademark, I renamed the open source version of SimCity to Micropolis, which was its original working title. It would be safe to call this project "PGMicropolis" as long as it wasn't for profit.

At the time, there was a disk drive manufacturer by that name, so Will Wright renamed it SimCity.

Fortunately the guy who now owns the rights to the Micropolis trademark (and is an old school hacker who really gets it) was kind enough to allow us to use the name for non commercial purposes, under the Micropolis Public Name License.

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/Microp...

Here's the explanation from the MicropolisCore repo's LICENSE file:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/LICENS...

>MICROPOLIS LICENSING

>The Micropolis project operates under two important licenses:

>1. The Micropolis GPL License Notice - This is the GNU General Public License with additional terms added by Electronic Arts to protect the SimCity trademark while allowing the code to be freely used and modified.

>2. The Micropolis Public Name License - This license governs the use of the "Micropolis" name itself, which is a registered trademark of Micropolis Corporation.

>We extend our sincere gratitude to Electronic Arts <https://www.ea.com> for their generosity in releasing the SimCity source code under an open-source license, and to Micropolis Corporation <https://www.micropolis.com> for allowing the community to use the Micropolis name for this open-source city simulation project. Please respect both Electronic Arts' SimCity trademark and Micropolis Corporation's Micropolis trademark by adhering to the terms of these licenses. Additionally, we ask all users to please honor the terms of the <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html> GNU General Public License v3, which protects the freedoms that allow this project to exist and thrive as open-source software.

More details, and another cautionary tale about accidentally getting sued for trademark infringement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46981012

>This matters more than people think. Jeff Braun, CEO of Maxis, told me this story:

>"Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it 'confusion in the marketplace'. We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."

>So please: call the game Micropolis, not SimCity, or EA's lawyers may come knocking. And unlike Toho, EA and their Saudi investors and Jarod Kushner might want to use their bone saws on you, which are much worse than Godzilla.

If any busy-body lawyers find this thread and actually want to go after someone's who's disparaging their trademark, they should look into this instead of open source projects:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952567

>I let the domain "micropolisonline.com" expire, which I was using for the old OpenLaszlo/Flash Python/SWIG/C++ client/server based version of open source SimCity, and somebody took it over and replaced it with AI generated claptrap, stealing a lot of my own and other's images without any credit. It even promises the source code, but doesn't actually link to it, just has promises and placeholders.

>It totally misrepresents what Micropolis is, which was based on the original SimCity classic, and confuses it with all the subsequent versions of SimCity and other made-up stuff. And it never mentions the GPL-3 license, EA's license and restrictions on the use of their SimCity trademark, or Micropolis's license to use their trademark. I have no idea what the point of it is.

Here's some more interesting stuff about applying machine learning and LLMs to Micropolis:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46981043

>Sam Earle's fractal neural network approach (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.03896) is exactly this kind of thing. His key trick: recursive weight-sharing in fractal convolutional blocks, so each column of the network acts as a continuous-valued cellular automaton ticking different numbers of times. The deepest column gets a 33x33 receptive field -- enough to connect power across an entire 32x32 map in one forward pass.

>The agents discovered power-plant + residential pairing, road placement for density, zone clustering by type, and traffic-avoiding road layouts. When stuck at local optima, a human player could intervene (deleting power plants) to force re-exploration -- and the agent would improve its design.

>The paper was 2019, before LLMs were doing this kind of thing. Different paradigm (RL on tile grids vs. LLMs on coordinate text), same hard problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46981059

>Sam Earle did exactly this with RL agents trained via quality-diversity methods on Micropolis:

https://github.com/smearle/gym-city

>[...] Here's more about my plans for making a multi player version of Micropolis with time travel, branching, and merging, by using github as a social network and MMPORG platform (when it's not down ;):

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/sims/s...

PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works