Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

Embrace, extend, extinguish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extingui...

Sorry, maybe I'm dense: what exactly are you afraid of being extinguished here?

It doesn't have to make sense. If someone posts about Microsoft someone else has to comment with a twenty year old business strategy from a guy who hasn't worked there in a decade.

I'm sorry, if I wasn't entirely clear. It's not so much about being anti-Microsoft or even anti-Minecraft. I love Minecraft and the new Microsoft is really good as compared to the old one.

But, there's a lot of value in having an open source and libre edition of anything which started out or is maintained as a closed-source, proprietary system.

Consider: Firefox versus IE, Linux versus OSX or Windows, or LibreOffice versus Microsoft Office.

With Minecraft, there is no opportunity for developers to really get on-board to build stuff with them. The source is closed and Mojang is AWOL when it comes to the developer API.

Minetest, on the other hand, is LGPL and is freely available.

Perhaps a better approach would be to simply say that if people are then looking for something a bit above and beyond, in terms of programmability, this is something they can look at, rather than talking about "fighting" Microsoft.

mine craft or education I guess

They way this term is thrown around, curious if the posters ever understood the strategy or even read the linked wiki page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com