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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

For $2.5 billion I would absolutely renege on a promise to open source my code. Every time.

If I was already rich (Like Mojang was), I actually wouldn't.

YMMV.

Notch ended up set for life and distributed out huge sums of cash to all of the employees after the sale who were not rich.

At the end of the day its a video game, not firmware for someones heart implant. If it matters to anyone, they can just write their own video game.

Yes, that's one way to see it.

But Minecraft is likely to be what Notch will be remembered for, yet he doesn't even own the rights to his own work anymore.

If that made him rich, it'd be one thing. But as he was already rich... was it really worth it? It might be something that torments him for the rest of his life.

This has some parallels to Palmer Luckey's Oculus sale to Facebook. We already know he regrets doing that. Some promises were already broken; FB got him really good.

It is unfortunate, but the field psychologists employed by Facebook got him to sell Oculus. Not unlike Faust and Mephistopheles.

People did, that's minetest... and now microsoft has been using apparently bogus copyright complaints to get it taken down. So much for "can just write their own".

>and now microsoft has been using apparently bogus copyright complaints to get it taken down.

That'd be HN front page worthy. How come I haven't heard about this?

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomme...

>The company is AppDetex, they appear to author automated solutions for finding copyright infringement so it's probably a mistake on their part

Yeah, the usual robot DMCA fare any random project may get.

Yes and, the app is down none the less due to the false and defamatory statements made "under penalty of perjury" from an agent being paid by Microsoft.

That's what DMCA counter claims are for.

They can sue if they think they have any grounds. (tip: they actually don't)

Counterplan: accept the $2.5 billion. Spend $10 million to fund the development of an equivalent or better open source voxel game engine. Everyone wins.

His agreement probably prohibits that.

Fund it in secret. Name it "Minetest."

Isn't it Java? It's basically already open source.

It's obfuscated

While it is obfuscated, newer versions provide unobfuscation mappings to make moodders' lifes easier

You typically only do that the the intended API used for modders, would guess that is what is done here?

Not quite the same thing.

There is no official modding API for the Java edition unless that changed some time ago. I remember there being plans for it almost a decade ago now but nothing coming out of it for the Java edition - Bedrock however got modpack support.

Can't be that bad if there's so many mods.

You obviously haven't battled the mod game by rebuilding and fixing your mods from zero every time a new version comes out.

The good tooling is from the community. Not majong and especially not Microsoft.

Open Source is not about having source code.

It is about the license meeting OSI's requirements, which are more or less the same as GNU's four freedoms.

The main problem with Minecraft is how Microsoft, due to Mojang's decision to sell, is at the centre.

This is such an important game to computer history, and it has such huge community. It deserves better than this.

IMHO the community is best served by alternative, actual open-source clients and servers, and it would be healthy to recreate everything Microsoft currently owns.

Minetest is one such effort. This one is from scratch.

The incremental approach is another possible route.

Oh, so I can decompile Minecraft, make a bunch of my own changes, change the name (to avoid trademark issues) and then sell the result? Can you point me in the direction of a license or other legal document which grants me these rights?

That's what it means for something to be open source as opposed to source-available after all.

You can’t do that on open source projects… that’s called stealing. Licenses basically never allow anything like that.

They ... do let you do that. Being able to make changes to the code and redistribute your changes is literally the whole point of open source, and the popular licenses don't contain restrictions on making money (nor could they, if they want to fit the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source).

The permissive open-source licenses (MIT, BSD, ...) let you just take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some proprietary product, and sell that product. The only requirements are usually that you maintain some attribution notice. The MIT license, for example, says this: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software".

The copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...) lets you take the code, make whatever changes you want, package it up into some product, and sell that product; but you need to provide your product's source code to your customers.

Show me an open source license which prohibits me from taking the source code and selling a product based on it.

The commonly used licenses like GPL and MIT don't put any restrictions on commercial use granted you don't break any of the conditions and limitations.

Theoretically you could even just take any software using any of those licenses, optionally package it up and then commercially redistribute it as is and it would not breach the license. Needless to say people probably wouldn't look at you favorably in that case though.

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