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Comment by MostAwesomeDude | Hacker News Reader

He has worked hard to torch the bridges between Mojang and the open-source communities surrounding Minecraft. He doesn't like people hacking his code, or creating tools which interoperate with his releases. You might have noticed that some mods have been pulled into the main Minecraft tree; the person doing that pulling is always jeb, another Mojang employee. Notch himself isn't very happy about it.

Projects like Bravo and Bukkit don't have any official endorsement or acknowledgement. Our channels of communication keep getting narrower and narrower. It's to the point where I've personally given up on actually talking to Mojang at all.

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That's what I admire about John Carmack. He wants people to hack his games and do stuff with them. He pushes to release old engines as GPL (soon the Doom 3 engine will be released, offering some real game code to study for people wanting to get into game development)

Notch has a similar attitude, as expressed at http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp,

specifically "once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source."

The difference of course is that id has a track record.

The difference is id's sources aren't shitty Java applets that noone wants to look through ;)

I kid, I kid...

Id games have lot's of artwork, levels, etc. that is not released under GPL. In minecraft it's users that create the content. Id can release their engines under GPL without harming their sales.

This comment would be meaningful when Minecraft has been out in the market for 3+ years.

Hmm, if I am not mistaken they are soon to release a totally free modding membership, which will basically means access some (most ?) of the source code to modders.

Actually, it's here : http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4955141617/the-plan-for-mods

Also, I'd be curious to know your sources regarding these infos (particularly the "notch isn't very happy about it" part). You say "our channels of communication", are you somehow involved with Bukkit or Bravo ?

The source code will be shared source, not open source; it will not be something which people can freely redistribute.

I wrote Bravo. One of my big supporters is a guy who has been involved with Mojang's inner workings for a long time, and who has told many a horror story about the inner circles of MC communities. (Name withheld for privacy reasons.) There are Mojang employees, like mollstam (the webmaster), chilling in our IRC channel, but we're really not able to get much information transferred back and forth. Things like on-the-wire exploits and data leaks aren't received by upstream in a reasonable timeframe, which makes it painful to do good security.

I would really like to see Notch release the whole thing under a non-commercial license. They should set up a bug tracker, develop in public, etc., and otherwise run as a normal OSS project, with the caveat that it is not full Free Software because of the clause preventing commercial activity.

I appreciate RMS and the Four Freedoms and what it's done for software, but I think we'd see a lot more code and a lot more relative freedom out there if someone set up a precedent and a pattern for other developers to follow in releasing source while maintaining revenue stream. It's not realistic to GPL everything, as the main developer can't make any money at that point. However, it is reasonable to release the source and say either "distribution must be limited to persons with a valid Minecraft license" or go totally non-commercial and only allow freeware derivatives (without separate license).

In this age, nothing is lost by doing this; people who aren't going to abide the license are not going to abide the license anyway, and the object code is copied around and traded on pirate networks freely. So, what more is lost by providing the source to all paying customers under legal terms that forbid activity that could threaten Mojang's revenue stream? I can't say I know of anything, but the benefit would be huge.

The only protection left against any digitized good is purely legal. If something gets online and a substantial portion of people have an interest in it, expect it to be irrevocably and freely traded in violation of any terms you establish. However, anything significant enough to be a threat to Mojang's profit stream will be vulnerable to legal remedies, and no major player (i.e., no one who'd have the money to pay Mojang) will run that risk when they know they will be sued and lose. It's just easier and cheaper to pay in the first place.

If they're planning on releasing the source to the mod community they might as well just open it straight up because it's bound to get leaked anyway.

I don't know how you can publicly release the source and expect a license header to prevent people from compiling it at home, and jilting you of a sale. You can't have an activation function either- your customers have the source!

Of course, he could just give up on the revenue, but I am sure like any real human being, he has probably grown fond of his new cash cow, and I don't blame him. Especially as this is his first real hit.

Colloquy for iOS does exactly this. Then again, you can't install a binary on your iOS device without a developer license, so I guess this model can't be replicated outside of iOS.

I do this too with some of my iOS apps. I put them GPL licensed onto github and anyone with the knowledge (and dev license from Apple) can get the apps practically for free.

But I'm not really vocal about that. If someone finds the source: great for them. If not great for my wallet ;)

As I said in my post, you can't stop people from compiling it at home. But, you also can't stop people from downloading the object code. Minecraft is frequently pirated and traded. There is no effective difference. In fact, people who are interested in obtaining Minecraft outside of legal channels are just going to pirate the object code anyway -- it's not very likely they'll want to download and compile the source and go through that pain when they could just download the pre-built versions.

There is no additional risk to revenue. Individuals who want to circumvent the licensing requirements do it with or without source. Companies who may misappropriate the code know better than to do so because they know they will be sued and immediately lose, so they will buy licenses from Mojang anyway. Seeing the "cool stuff" that can be done by Minecraft's engine, etc., that hobbyists put together with the code, may in fact convince people with money to license it more than just keeping it closed altogether.

You don't need the source code to extend a game (mod), you need a documented API.

Probably rather offtopic but: I've never understood the motivation behind "modding". Why put so much work into someone other's project instead of starting something own?

I understand modifying/augmenting open source - because it's a community effort and the result belongs to all of us. But creating modifications for commercial products you will never have any real rights on and then being angry with the owner when he tries to protect his baby/vision - that's just behind my horizon.

My thoughts on why I would want to mod something very popular is because I would almost immediately have a following if my product is good. Also, I'd be able to create a mod that has functionality that I desire, and I'd get the satisfaction out of using it. And lastly, I don't know if this is always true, but it certainly makes you feel more elite changing the behavior of someone else's code rather than my own. There may be other reasons I haven't mentioned.

Probably rather offtopic but: I've never understood the motivation behind "modding". Why put so much work into someone other's project instead of starting something own?

For the same reason people use and license game engines made by other people instead of developing everything from scratch. A large chunk of some difficult work has been done for them.

>Probably rather offtopic but: I've never understood the motivation behind "modding". Why put so much work into someone other's project instead of starting something own?

Why do people spend so much work into learning to sing someone else's song or arrange it instead of just writing their own?

Maybe they like the work despite the fact that it's not their creation. Maybe they don't have the skill to create something from scratch but they can do a great deal standing on the shoulders of others. Maybe they just aren't that concerned with how lawyers divvy up who "owns" what ideas.

It's probably a combination of the above.

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