Yknow.. this is kind of backwards. If someone wants to donate to a server and get diamonds, I don't see how that is Mojang's place to dictate.
If they were hosting the servers, sure. But on a private server?
If they were hosting the servers, sure. But on a private server?
For most private servers you see, they will have a list of "donation" amounts and a "reward" for each, however this is quite clearly a sale since you are exchanging a commodity for money. To be classed as a donation, you would need to donate money without the requirement of something in return.
I think Mojang are clearly right here, but not to the advantage of the minecraft community.
Most servers are run using Bukkit [1] which is licensed under GPL [2]. The client and the protocols are Mojang's but the server's code is free to modify without such restrictions.
[1] http://bukkit.org/ [2] https://github.com/Bukkit/Bukkit/blob/master/LICENCE.txt
Is this really the case though? Aren't these people paying for a specific economy type created in game? they could go play any number of free servers or run their own, but they choose to play a P2W server. The server ops are really charging money for the service of the in game economy being micromanaged.
For example, let's say I run Mac OS X server on a computer somewhere and charge for user accounts on it. I'm charging people for the bits of code written by Apple, right? But surely this is completely reasonable of me, and Apple has no place to tell me that I can't charge money for this.
Taking it further, maybe I allow free accounts which only have access to a few shell commands, and then you can pay more to unlock other commands. Again, I see nothing wrong with that, even though I didn't make those other commands.