All that said, though, official BYOND policy is that rips are allowed to exist, because frankly there's not enough manpower to stop them and to deal with the inevitable complaints from doing so.
I will volunteer for this task should the need for it come. I believe that need has come and has been here for a while, just no one has addressed it. I'm also sure many other people's would volunteer for this task. This however, is probably a useless idea. I'd do a backflip if this were to be accepted.
Sorry, but I prefer to answer your question with another question. What is good about them? In any light, I can't see one thing good about them.
It is interesting how one game could be fun when it's just the same as the original version and all other rips of its kind. If the original isn't still around, a likely reason is that the rip forced it out of existence via discouragement at all of their hard work being merely ripped and duplicated in an instant. Also, due to said discouragement, the game misses out on many possibilities of further 'fun' advancements, as the person who made the game initially and actually had the skill to add cool features would no longer be working on the project.
Unfortunately, they don't help in any way. As far as I know, 'helping' someone refers to doing something beneficial to them, and there are no benefits from ripping. The newbie programmer will more likely just use the same code with a few modifications, and not learn from it. More often than not, the code that was taken practiced poor programming techniques, and any learning that *does* happen results in said newbie programmer investing time into negative-learning. If said programmer truly wanted to learn, they would read through the DM Guide, read and learn from DM Demos, and eventually they may even be able to read through the more advanced DM Libraries. As well, they would learn to use the DM Reference (also found in DreamMaker) to solve many questions that they may have. Further questions could always be brought to Developer How-To or Code Problems, as appropriate. There is no reason to try and learn from a poorly programmed project, especially when the project wasn't intended to learn from, as are the aforementioned sources.
In addition, by providing such a large crutch for a project, the EXACT same thing tends to clutter up the Hub very rapidly (why not, when 100 people can take the code, compile it, make a Hub page, and load it up?).
That's about all of the would-be positives of rips that I can even imagine being mentioned. Please, though, feel free to introduce me to any other ideas. :/
Hiead