Chris Sawyer has not been involved in TTD for quite some time, and any remaining rights he had were bought out officially in 2024.

Chris Sawyer was last involved in the IP when it was rugpulled out from under him in the early 2000s and sent to Frontier Developments, the Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster guys, to bury the IP in an unmarked grave with RCT3; Frontier is also the same guys that screwed Haemimont Games games over, the Tropico and Surviving Mars guys, leading to the studio being bought out and rebooted by Paradox to continue Surviving Mars development.

The IP ownership has been legally retained by Atari SA, aka Infogrames, aka GT Interactive, aka GoodTimes Entertainment, which has a very long history of screwing game developers and stealing their IP out from under them and also misrepresenting IP ownership and licensing.

Now, it is also worth mentioning that Chris Sawyer is anti-open source, so he probably personally approves of trying to steal money from OpenTTD players, even if he isn't personally getting a cut of it.

> Now, it is also worth mentioning that Chris Sawyer is anti-open source, so he probably personally approves of trying to steal money from OpenTTD players, even if he isn't personally getting a cut of it.

It's pretty rude to put something like that on him if he hasn't actually said that.