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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

There goes all hope of Minecraft being released as open source.

There was a blog post from several years ago from Notch saying that after he made enough money with the game, he would "probably clean it up and release it as open source". Oh well.

Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their binaries on shady file upload sites, their "project page" in a forum thread, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.

So much wasted potential. Anyhow, congratulations Microsoft.

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To be honest, despite what Notch said several years ago I don't think it was ever well on its way to being open-sourced. Any hope that he would "clean it up" vanished when he lost interest in taking active part in development and passed it on. Not to mention that they've been working on a public modding API for years that never took off.

> Instead now we have the DMCA-infighting and an atrocious modding community that hosts their source code on shady file upload sites, make their measly money from adfly-like sites and have never heard of Github.

Couldn't agree more, but it's more of a consequence of most modders being new and inexperienced developers and kids. Some of the bigger and more professional modding projects like Bukkit are already hosted on GitHub [0], so I wouldn't blame it on just being closed source. It's not guaranteed that it would be that much better, though it might be because that way a lot more existing developers might feel like contributing.

[0] https://github.com/Bukkit/Bukkit

There are consequences already, whether it is related or not. Andy Hunt withdrew his recent Minecraft book due to the Bukkit library being pulled via DMCA: https://twitter.com/PragmaticAndy/status/510437307389067265 https://twitter.com/PragmaticAndy/status/510438941959659520

Bukkit is possibly the only shred of sanity in the Minecraft world. I know its original developer (Nathan Adams) and he is absolutely top-notch (no pun intended) and deserves every bit of success he had with Bukkit and later with Mojang - he now works there.

So no, bukkit isn't the problem. The problem is all the bukkit mods, and the situation between bukkit and mojang. Urgh.

Bukkit is a licensing disaster zone though - the developers decided to license it under the GPL without exceptions even though it had to be tightly integrated with proprietary Minecraft server code to actually be useful. Now that CraftBukkit - the glue code to do that - has been DMCAed and everyone knows it's not legal to distribute, Bukkit is useless.

The only fork of it that's still standing is Spigot, who are releasing their updates as binary patches against the last pre-DMCA-notice release to avoid redistributing the stuff which was the subject of the DMCA, and aren't making any source-level patches available. (Which in turn is almost certainly a violation of the GPL/LGPL license that CraftBukkit was under.)

Yeah it's kind of sad. I really felt that when it went open source we would have seen a huge new explosion in creativity with the game that would have given it legs for years to come.

I really don't mind that Notch sold out. I do mind that he says that this wasn't about money. It sounds more like he is trying to convince himself of that more than anyone else.

If it really wasn't about money why not just open source it and walk away? Or just give it to the employees of Mojang? He already has over 100+ million, so he's certainly not worried about food.

More power to him for making an insane amount of money, because he certainly deserves it, but don't bullshit me about your motivations.

Does anyone else feel at least a little betrayed?

I bought Minecraft quite early, back when it wasn't such a big hit. Normally I do not buy games. But I'm all for free & open source games, and back then what the site said read or at least felt like a personal promise to eventually release the code. That is why I bought Minecraft. The game looked interesting, and I wanted to contribute to (eventual) open source gaming. I wouldn't have paid for it otherwise... and no, I don't actually play Minecraft.

> Does anyone else feel at least a little betrayed?

No. I bought the game (cheap), I played it a bunch, I enjoyed it. They have no further obligations to me.

Seems like you bought it for a very silly reason! I bought it because it was a game I wanted to play. I think I spent $14 on the pre-alpha? The first 20 minutes of playing that game (which turned into probably 15 hours over that weekend) alone were worth $14.

Am I also silly for having donated money to some open source projects?

What about the people who back to-be-released-as-free-software projects on kickstarter or such, are they silly?

I might be silly. I know, I'm not like everyone else. :-)

But hopefully there are more silly people like me.

>Am I also silly for having donated money to some open source projects?

No. Because they are open source. Minecraft was not. Vague platitudes about someday being open source are worthless. Notch is notoriously dishonest and would say or do anything to push minecraft early on. Look how quickly he jumped from 4chan being his only customers to "4chan is the worst thing ever right reddit!?".

I'm sorry, but I share the idea that it's a silly reason. Paying for closed source software to contribute to open source gaming? I don't understand that. It's different than say, downloading Ubuntu and donating $20. With one you're saying "I enjoy this free product, take $20 to help continue development." With the other, you're telling them it's ok to not provide it for free, and you'll gladly pay for it.

I bought Minecraft for what it was, and still is, a sandbox game that I've had hundreds of hours of fun in. I've bought it for several friends of mine for the same reason. But I won't buy something because of the chance it might become something I want, when it currently isn't. (I learned that lesson when pre-purchasing Spore).

Actually the intended message was that I'll gladly pay for it since you promised to make it free. But I guess the message gets lost and this is another reason why voting with one's wallet doesn't work.

We're still looking for a way to fund free games. And I don't think donations work too well. More importantly, the people who actually make games don't seem to find it working too well, because they are not making free donation-supported games. On the other hand, many game authors already see the value in eventually freeing their work. So if they promise to do that, it is a reasonably effective way of getting a free game by first helping them do what it takes to make it profitable enough to actually build and finish the game and eat something too. Is it not?

It doesn't need to be open source. Minetest (an Irrlicht C++ clone) is open-source, as is Infiniminer. Also, Voxel.js. All the relevent code is available for future learning...

I'm not sure what you said is (solely) the result of Mincraft being closed source. As far as I know, Android is released as open source, but most of what you said also applies to that modding community.

Infiniminer still exists, I bet Zach wouldn't mind that good PR.

This is the first time i've seen the word infiniminer in 2 years, not sure i'll see it again. I think it already got the publicity it would out of minecraft, the game is already well enough known without MS.

there you go https://github.com/fogleman/Craft

clean re implementation

There goes all hope of Minecraft being released as open source.

Microsoft has been releasing more and more of their software platform as open source. It's not outside the realm of possibility that some bits of Minecraft would be open sourced.

So they released the source to a few new developer frameworks in an attempt to win back some love from us geeks.

While I'm grateful for that, I'd be shocked if they released the source for any of their consumer products, including VS.

I see what you're saying, but Minecraft is a different enough kind of consumer product that an entirely different set of rules may apply.

Not holding my breath, but I wouldn't be surprised by anything at this point.

The .NET Compiler Platform and parts of the .NET Source being open sourced will hopefully tell a different story.

The MS of 5 years ago, you'd have said it would never happen. The MS of today, it's not impossible (though it is unlikely).

Microsoft has gained a lot of respect from me when they did that. However I doubt they would go out of their way to open source minecraft.

But hey, who knows which of my words I might eat with gravy sauce?

The microsoft lawyers siding with oracle claiming that APIs are copyrightable paints a business as usual story

Like others have said I think open sourcing was always unlikely. But I think a real clean mod api is a real possibility now.

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