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Comment by ssl232 | Hacker News Reader

Of note is the Minecraft website from 2011 [1], where Markus Persson said: "Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain."

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110920065648/http://www.minecra...

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He probably expected that sales would go down to irrelevant. That never happened, instead he got an absurd deal. MS is open sourcing to satisfy modders, eventually for more reach and cash. The intentions are very different and it would be awful to blame notch for that.

The intentions may be different, but it doesn’t mean one of them has to be bad. If MS makes money and users get to do more with the open source code, it’s a win-win.

Hit the nail on the head!

At least the sales is not dying at all. Surprisingly the number of active players is still increasing.

[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/wccftech.com/minecraft-sales-14...

I was hoping Microsoft buying it would mean they would make it free or at least drop the price. There's no way I'll be paying 24€ for a pixelated sandbox game written in Java.

They released the Windows 10 version for free for a period of time. That’s the version that is cross platform with the likes of the Switch and Xbox One iirc. The RaspberryPi version was also released for free but you know, It’s the Rpi not not exactly a power house. And I’m sure the Java version has been on sale a couple of times.

I ended up buying the game on the 360, PC and Android over the years (though I think I only paid something like 10p for the Android version during a sale or Google Offer). Yeah it’s a pixel game, yes it’s Java, yes it can run like shit, yes it’s a sandbox game with no real objective. But it’s surprisingly relaxing. I’ve lost count of the amount of hours I’ve spend just building.

If you don't understand Minecraft, then don't play Minecraft.

I bought it when it was $7, way back in the alpha days. I bought it because I was excited by the idea. I'd still pay $30 for it today, if I didn't already own it, because I still love the idea.

There is a reason why game publishers don't take decisions based on programming languages.

Why not?

My kids love it. They learned to play it from teenagers who have moved on. And they're teaching littler kids how to play it, too.

Maybe that's the thing.

Man I remember that. I was disappointed he didn't follow through, especially since Minecraft made him obscenely rich and there's really no reason to keep it closed source.

Microsoft followed through where Notch couldn't. How about that...

I mean for what it's worth sales never really died out.

well to be fair Microsoft gave him almost 2 billion for it, at which point it wasn't his to open source anymore, and for him being a sellout I don't blame him, I blame his obnoxious fanbase at the time.

Oh of course, but there was a long period before the sale during which it could have happened.

When did "sales start dying"?

Never.

> Microsoft followed through where Notch couldn't.

But this isn't the full source code.

It's more than Notch ever released? And it's my understanding there's more to follow.

The entire source of Minecraft has been available to mod authors for quite some time.

That's like saying everything is open source if you can write assembly. Minecraft only ever released binaries and they also went out of their way to use an obfuscator so all of the class and method names are garbage and change every update.

They also released a modders kit which renamed all the classes and methods, producing source code which, when compiled again, produced Minecraft.

The Mod Coder Pack wasn't developed by Mojang. MCP is the work of the community to reverse engineer and deobfuscate Mojang's binaries. The whole point of creating the MCP in the first place was to get around Mojang's use of tools to break most Java decompilers and try and document and come up with sensible names for all of the classes.

If Mojang had simply compiled and released their game without obfuscating it first then there would be no point to the MCP in the first place.

The person who created the MCP was hired by Mojang several years ago.

That person still releases the MCP with Mojang's blessing last I checked.

That doesn't change the fact that Mojang didn't make MCP. If Searge didn't step up and do it there's no reason to believe that Mojang ever would have come up with something similar. Mojang promised for years and years that "the modding API will be released any time now" yet they haven't done anything to materially support the modding community other than to hire Searge and the Bukkit team.

I guess they finally have behavior packs like resource packs for Bedrock edition (used to be Minecraft PE) but that doesn't allow you to write any kind of turing complete code for custom behaviors. That's the closest they've come and all that lets you do is stuff like make pigs behave like a creeper and explode when the player gets too close.

To date it has been 8 YEARS literally the better part of a decade from when Mojang first announced that they were going to release a modding API and they still haven't done anything. Releasing these two libraries as open source is a nice gesture but that doesn't actually do anything for the modding community. The least they could do is just stop obfuscating their releases so that MCP isn't stuck doing a bunch of unnecessary work.

decompiling is not the same as releasing the source with a license.

It didn't just decompile. It renamed all classes and methods and it included a source code usage license.

Maybe his hands were tied in the sense that releasing things open source would limit his ability to package and sell it off at a later date? I'm sure there were negotiations in progress at the time he would have considered doing so and from my POV, which could be terribly wrong, it would seem that releasing the thing you are considering to sell, for free, would sort of meddle with the entire process of selling it off?

GPL draconian? How do people misunderstand it so? The GPL is there so that your contribution will actually benefit society in the long term.

You are confusing purpose (what GPL intends to accomplish) with methods (how the GPL attempts to accomplish it's purpose); “draconian” described the latter and your description of the former does not, even if true, contradict it.

My guess is Notch, like many developers, was put off by the "viral" licensing [0] of the GPL.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license

One of the things GPL does is take away many of the developer's rights. It's a protection for code, not for it's creators - and the latter is what most licenses try to protect.

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