Turns out Sudoku (new in GNOME 2.18!) is the output of a Japanese game company called Nikoli. Nikoli gives much of the credit for their creativity and prodigious output to their community of puzzle solver-readers, who suggest new games and refinements to old games to Nikoli. As icing on the community production cake, they plans not to trademark future games in the US in order to encourage their growth. Full NYT story here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
One Comment
But Nikoli did not invent Sudoku, though they coined the term Sudoku to refer to the puzzle, and have a trademark on “Sudoku” in Japan.
See the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku
The weird thing is that many Japanese use the original term by the American inventor, “Number Place”, to avoid the trademark, while Americans call it Sudoku.
One Trackback/Pingback