1. You see people saying "Dune" is a "Star Wars" rip-off and the first impulse is just to laugh b/c of course the novel Dune predates Star Wars & influenced it etc. But there's a larger thing at work, which is the shared universe of the science fiction genre. 
2. One of the interesting features of science fiction is the way concepts in it are shared. Not unlike scientific discoveries, once a writer comes up with a great idea, it gets added to common storehouse of the genre & built on: robots, time travel, galactic empires.
3. The idea of the "rip off" is the language of fandom & intellectual property lawyers, within science fiction writing community, it's recognized that writers work by sharing and adding to the storehouse of ideas.
4. A specific example: from early on (in works like John Carter) s.f. writers loved the image of sword fights in futuristic or alien environments. But this made no sense: if you had laser ray guns, why use swords? In 1949, Charles Harness had the solution.
5. Harness was a run-of-the-mill schlock pulpsmith but in 1949 story he posited that in future with force fields, swords would be useful because they could be slow enough to penetrate at close range, unlike lasers. This became standard solution, used in many works like Dune.
6. Aside from Harness' forcefields/swords solution, Dune also borrow heavily from Cordwainer Smith (desert planet, navigators) & is a real melange of other sources (Lawrence of Arabia, counterinsurgency manuels, Quileute folkways, the Koran, etc).
7. The biggest commonality Star Wars has with Dune is that it's also a synthesizing work, a bricolage of many sources (Dune but also Flash Gordon, Hidden Fortress, westerns, war movies, 1930s serials, etc).
8. @DavidKlion & I talk about the myriad sources of Dune, the way its the culmination of many cultural strands, in this podcast: jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-the-…
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