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Incomputing, aclone ishardware orsoftware that is designed to function in exactly the same way as another system.[1] A specific subset of clones areremakes (orremades), which are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued products.
Clones and remakes are created for reasons including competition,standardization, availability across platforms, and ashomage.Compatibility with the original system is usually the explicit purpose of cloning hardware or low-level software such asoperating systems (e.g.AROS andMorphOS are intended to be compatible withAmigaOS). Application software is cloned by providing the same functionality.
Commercially-motivated clones are made often during a competitor product's initial successful commercial run, intentionally competing with the original and trying to participate in their success.
WhenIBM announced theIBM PC in 1981, other companies such asCompaq decided to offer clones of the PC as a legal reimplementation from the PC's documentation orreverse engineering. Because most of the components, except the PC'sBIOS, were publicly available, all Compaq had to do was reverse-engineer the BIOS. The result was a machine with similar performance and lower price than the machines cloned. The use of the term "PC clone" to describeIBM PC compatible computers fell out of use in the 1990s; the class of machines it now describes are simply called PCs, but the early use of the term "clone" usually implied a higher level of compatibility with the original IBM PC than "PC-Compatible", with (often Taiwanese) clones of the original circuit (and possibly ROMs) the most compatible (in terms of software they would run and hardware tests they would pass), while "legitimate" new designs such as theSanyoMBC-550 andData General/One, while not infringing on copyrights and adding innovations, tended to fail some compatibility tests strongly dependent upon detailed hardware compatibility (such as ability to runMicrosoft Flight Simulator, or any software that bypassed the standardsoftware interrupts and directly accessed hardware at the expected pre-defined locations, or—in the case of the MBC-550 for example—wrotediskettes which could not be directly interchanged with standard IBM PCs).
While the term has mostly fallen into commercial disuse, the termclone for PCs still applies to a PC made to entry-level or above standard (at the time it was made) which bears no commercial branding (e.g.,Acer,Dell,HP, IBM). This includes, but is not limited to, PCs assembled by home users or corporate IT departments. (See alsoWhite box (computer hardware).)
There were manyNintendo Entertainment System hardware clones due to the popularity and longevity of theNintendo Entertainment System.
Examples for hardware remakes include recent home computer remakes.
A special kind of hardware remakes areemulators which implement the hardware functionality completely in software. For instance, theWinUAE emulator software tries to behave exactly like a physicalAmiga.
Software can be cloned byreverse engineering or legal reimplementation from documentation or other sources, or by observing a program's appearance and behavior. The reasons for software cloning may include circumventing undesirable licensing fees, acquiring knowledge about the features of the system or creating aninteroperable alternative for an unsupportedplatform.GNU, a clone ofUNIX, was motivated by a need of thefree software movement for an operating system composed of entirelyfree software.
In the United States, the case ofLotus v. Borland allows the functionality of a program to be cloned so long ascopyright in the code and interface is not infringed.
Yet, the public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (such as the appearance of an icon). For example, in August 2012,Electronic Arts, via itsMaxis division, put forth a lawsuit againstZynga, claiming that itsFacebook game,The Ville, was a direct clone of EA's own Facebook game,The Sims Social. The lawsuit challenges thatThe Ville not only copies the gameplay mechanics ofThe Sims Social, but also uses art and visual interface aspects that appear to be inspired byThe Sims Social.[2][3][4] The two companies settled out of court on undisclosed terms in February 2013.[5]
Examples of software cloning include theReactOS project which tries to cloneMicrosoft Windows, andGNU Octave, which treats incompatibility withMathWorksMATLAB as a bug.[6]
Since the start of thevideo game industry, clones of successful concepts and games have been common. The first influentialfirst-person shooter,Doom, led in the 1990s to the creation of a new genre dubbed asDoom clones. In the 2000s, theopen worldaction-adventureGrand Theft Auto inspired the creation of manyGrand Theft Auto clones.
Remakes of software are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued software.
A good share of software remakes arefangames ofcomputer games andgame engine recreation made by thefan community as part ofretrogaming, to address e.g.compatibility issues or non-availability of the original, e.g. a shutdown server gets substituted with aserver emulator.
Since the 2000s there has been an increasing number of commercial remakes of classical games by the original developer or publisher for current platforms as thedigital distribution lowers the investment risk for niche releases.[7] When enhanced in some way (audio, graphics, etc.) new releases might be called "high definition" release or "special edition"; an example isThe Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition.[8][9]
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Adatabase clone is a complete and separate copy of a database system that includes the business data, thedatabase management system software and any other application tiers that make up the environment. Cloning is a different kind of operation toreplicate andbackup, in that the cloned environment is both fully functional and separate in its own right. Additionally, the cloned environment may be modified at its inception due to configuration changes or data subsetting.
Since 2010, clone computing, in the sense of replicating a session on a host computer in a virtual instance in thecloud, has been introduced. This allows the user to have access to a copy of their PC's desktop on any other computing device such as atablet computer, a personal computer running any operating system, WebOS,smartphones, etc.
The clone computer replicates, runs, and is always available through a series of cloud servers. Unlike remote management software, clone computing has no dependency on the host computer.
Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard drive to another disk or to an "image" file. Typically, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image. A cloned drive can replace the original, rather than simply containing backup copies of files.
Cloning software replicates the operating system, drives, software and patches of one computer for a variety of purposes, including setting up multiple computers, hard drive upgrades, and system recovery in the event of disk failure or corruption.[10]
Incomputer programming, particularlyobject-oriented programming,cloning refers toobject copying by a method orcopy factory function, often calledclone orcopy, as opposed to by acopy constructor. Cloning ispolymorphic, in that the type of the object being cloned need not be specified, in contrast to using a copy constructor, which requires specifying the type (in the constructor call).
The worst days [for game development] were the cartridge days for the NES. It was a huge risk – you had all this money tied up in silicon in a warehouse somewhere, and so you'd be conservative in the decisions you felt you could make, very conservative in the IPs you signed, your art direction would not change, and so on. Now it's the opposite extreme: we can put something up on Steam, deliver it to people all around the world, make changes. We can take more interesting risks.[...] Retail doesn't know how to deal with those games. On Steam [a digital distributor] there's no shelf-space restriction. It's great because they're a bunch of old, orphaned games.