Dude, anybody creating an isotropic clone has the potential to be sued. Donald certainly isn't going to condone or assist such a plan, and neither is dougz. Nor should they. Nor are we likely to freely give Goko our time or money in order to fix their service that we've already paid for.
Yeah, the way things are right now sucks. You can blame Goko for being incompetent or Jay for swallowing their pitch if you want. But don't ask for their blessing when you plan to create an illegal copy of their game.
If you don't charge money for people to use the thing, you can't really get anything worse than a C&D. IANAL, but several unofficial ways of playing Magic the Gathering online for free would just shut down when they got a C&D and post a message on the home page. I'd assume Wizards of the Coast has the legal prowess to get money from a lawsuit if they could.
As an aside, if you make a slightly modified Dominion with Silver at 4$, you can play Lab with zero actions, you immediately win upon obtaining 36 points, etc, slight changes that preserve the feel of the game but legally make it untargetable, you can avoid even a C&D and there will be a deckbuilding game on the internet that you can play without paying Sirlin's paypal.
(You could actually change it even less, they say, but I like the safe side)
It's a pretty complicated/weird situation. Someone in the thread said, "that's capitalism for you", but really, it's not, it's the opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is the idea of people competing openly, intellectual property law is an
exception to capitalism intended to encourage innovation. (Oh my God. That is the most epic unintended pun I have ever made.)
If an unofficial implementation came about, Goko probably would be too apathetic and understaffed to even send a C&D at this point. Unfortunately I think there's a less than 50%, but appreciable chance they would send a C&D, and then you've written a lot of fresh code that you might not be able to use for anything and that kind of sucks balls.
I really think intellectual property laws need to be reformed. (there's a common factoid that floats around that Star Wars is copyrighted until 2140 or something absurd like that.) Rather than sweeping reforms though, I think maybe there could be some particular exceptional rule on the books to apply to absurd situations like this one. Like, "If people pay 20% more than what you're charging, and then don't even send that money to the person who made the bootleg product, then mail it instead to (charity/the creator of the license itself/the national debt/a frozen account that the license holder can seize if they can entice that person to transfer to their service by offering better reliability and features), then the bootleg product can be legitimately used as a substitute." Or maybe some way to give legal standing to people who are being denied any legal access, whatsoever, to any reasonable service for an intellectual property because the license was sold to someone who is sitting on it.