[mcantor]

I really admire how much Notch seems to understand opposing viewpoints that most people would simply make inflammatory posts about. His diplomacy here, as well as with Bethesda, has been stellar: Not "Steam is a DRM-ridden mess that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "I understand why they'd want to control their platform." Not "Bethesda are an Orwellian corporate giant trying to crush the little guy, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "This is probably just lawyers being lawyers." Never a bridge burned. What respect and maturity! Hats off to you, Notch. I'm proud to be a part of the same community of developers as you.

[bena]

"His diplomacy here, as well as with Bethesda, has been stellar"

I don't think his diplomacy regarding Bethesda has been all that great. Openly mocking their claims probably hasn't earned him any goodwill. The quiz was pretty bad, especially the insult at the end. The tweets and encouragement of people ironically getting the two products confused also hurts his case.

[wtallis]

His handling of the Bethesda case is only bad if this really isn't a case of an overly-zealous legal department operating on autopilot. So far, there's no reason to suspect that:

All the information that's public indicates that Bethesda's claims are weak or entirely baseless, and they are not interested in reaching a compromise or really any two-way communication prior to going to court.

Any lawyer that starts a tenuous but high-profile suit without considering the PR aspects is simply crazy, but that seems to be what's happening. Notch has been trying to get someone at Bethesda with a human perspective to intervene, but so far, hasn't been successful.

[bena]

Bethesda is acting rationally and logically. Trademark is easily lost and Bethesda needs to be on top of any potentially infringing marks.

Notch is handling this in the worst way possible. The first thing he should have done is go to his lawyers, have them set up a meeting with Bethesda and their lawyers, then hash out everything quietly. No, the first thing he did was fire up the internet hate machine in response to a Cease & Desist.

Then he challenges them to a Quake match to settle it. Another bad move.

Then he posts a quiz that mocks Bethesda and actually doesn't help him in the way he thought it would as some people actually got some of the questions wrong.

[wtallis]

From Notch's blog:

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. [...] We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

Firing up the internet hate machine wasn't the first thing Notch did. He tried to open up a dialogue, before things got to the cease-and-desist stage. It didn't work. Bethesda's lawyers weren't interested in being reasonable.

Maintaining a trademark doesn't require constantly trying to expand it.

[MostAwesomeDude]

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.

[nkassis]

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)

[grey]

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."

[0x0x0x]

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

[piaskal]

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.

[beagle3]

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

[atomicdog]

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

I kid, I kid...

[norswap]

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 ?

[MostAwesomeDude]

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.

[cookiecaper]

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.

[sliverstorm]

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.

[cookiecaper]

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.

[GeneralMaximus]

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.

[leon_]

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 ;)

[shin_lao]

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

[leon_]

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.

[xiaoma]

>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.

[codabrink]

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.

[Goronmon]

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.

[streptomycin]

http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp

> I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL

[bugsy]

He's right that GPL is draconian and limits freedom. But I am not sure your point because you didn't state it. You have a drive by post where you post some cryptic excerpt that seems unrelated to the topic with no commentary. Are you a posting bot, or are you a person with a point? Speak clearly. Explain yourself.

If the intent is to be critical of notch, I can't see any fault in his saying he hopes to release source code eventually and that since the GPL is such an anti-freedom license (huh, actually my words not his, but my sincere interpretation and agreement with his 'draconian' term usage), he "might just possibly" release as public domain, which means completely unencumbered and free. That sounds pretty cool. He's not under any obligation to do so though, and I don't see that many other games sold on Steam are somehow better.

Or perhaps you meant to indicate that you think his true reason not to release on Steam is not what he said, but he is lying and the secret real reason is that he intends to release public domain, and for some reason Steam would not allow that after signing their draconian and freedom limiting contracts, that are as freedom limiting as the GPL.

Maybe. Don't know because your post was incoherent.

[dkersten]

I agree with everything you said, except for the following:

release as public domain, which means completely unencumbered and free

In general, this is true, but some countries do not have a concept of public domain and so releasing it into the public domain would make it completely unusable to people in those countries. Personally, I would prefer either the BSD or MIT license or something like the WTFPL[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

[georgemcbay]

Re: people in countries without public domain... is that a real actual problem that actually impacts people?

I mean, suppose a user in Nopublicdomainistan uses some software that is released in the public domain... clearly the author is never going to come after them for a copyright violation, even if their local government doesn't recognize public domain as a concept, so what is the actual real world problem they face in this situation?

I just don't see this as being a real problem.

[thristian]

IANAL, but:

I don't know of any countries that do not recognise public domain as a concept, but there are many countries (including the USA) whose copyright laws have no provision for an author 'giving up' their copyright. Just saying "I release this into the public domain" does not necessarily do that, any more than walking away from a house you own means you no longer own it. That means that if somebody says "I release this into the public domain", there's no reason why they couldn't change their mind and sue you for infringing their copyright later.

For more information, see this FAQ on public domain: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...

Also note that Creative Commons has a special "Creative Commons Zero" license designed to provide the same results as "I release this into the public domain" in all jurisdictions, and it takes at least a page of legalese to do so: http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/

TL;DR: saying "I release this into the public domain" probably doesn't do anything; just slap a BSD, MIT or ISC license on the work instead.

[nuclear_eclipse]

I think it's seen more as a problem for a) software with multiple contributors, and b) corporations that want to use open-source software. When there's no legally-recognized guarantee of rights to users of the software, you have to implicitly trust that the original creator will not change their mind and sue you later. In cases with multiple contributors, it adds that many more unknown entities with the ability to litigate. By releasing the software under a permissive license such as MIT or BSD, or even CC0, the legal wording is there to help guarantee your rights to use the software in the face of lawsuits.

[rmc]

"Ah sure, us using this software is technically illegal, but sure, the original author isn't going to come after us" is usually not a good line to write on your corporate "do we have enough licences audit"

The problem isn't that your might get sued, it's that you can't convince $POINTY_HAIRED_BOSS that you won't get sued.

[georgemcbay]

YMMV, I guess, depending upon where you work/have worked but despite working in commercial software, I've had a bigger problem convincing past bosses that using pirated software to do our jobs is a problem than I have had with bosses who were overly concerned about copyright law to the point where it would be an issue in my hypothetical case.

I still think the original objection is more retold fairy tale than truth, but if anyone wants to prove me wrong they can point me to a country where public domain isn't recognized, but random user-written OSS licenses are and the country has any sort of culture of respecting copyright in the first place.

[leon_]

> Nopublicdomainistan

Anyone said Germany? The concept of the "Urheberrecht" which many people falsly translate to copyright (it's more of a creator-right) is that you can not relinquish it in Germany. It's kinda like your mother can not "un-mother" herself from you ;)

That's why there's no real Public Domain in its purest form possible in Germany.

> clearly the author is never going to come after them. so what is the actual real world problem they face in this situation

The real problem is: A lack of legal certainty. You can not use PD in any bigger project if it is _possible_ that the original author might come after you.

[Schmidt]

In Sweden for example, you can't release something into the public domain.

There is also another problem, you can't disclaim some warranties for customers. So if you could release the software into the public domain, you could still be held accountable for what the software did after being modified.

[rufibarbatus]

Due to its language, I'm not sure the WTFPL would hold in court in just about any country. I don't mean just the profanity: it has no proper scope (i.e. it doesn't describe what's being licensed), it doesn't attach it to a proper author or maintainer (which, it turns out, may be a requirement in countries where intellectual property is described in terms of author's rights rather than copyright), and it doesn't specify what kinds of rights, warranties and whatnot the license waives the author/maintainer from.

</nitpicking>

[ceejayoz]

> In general, this is true, but some countries do not have a concept of public domain and so releasing it into the public domain would make it completely unusable to people in those countries.

I've heard this in the past. Functionally, what's the issue with this? The person who placed it into the public domain seems unlikely to sue in a country that doesn't recognize the public domain status.

[seanalltogether]

Maybe it's possible that some entity within that country could pick up the code, slap their own copyright on it, and claim to now own the code? Probably a long stretch but maybe that's the case.

[sukuriant]

Could we get a lawyer from one of those countries in here to answer this? I'm curious of the answer, as well.

[atomicdog]

>GPL is draconian and limits freedom.

How? Isn't the basis of GPL simply "Use this code however you want providing you make the source code you derive from it freely availble, too"?

[Pyrodogg]

For exactly the reason you pointed out.

The GPL guarantees that the code will forever be open due to the requirement that derivative works are released open and under the GPL.

What this complete 'code availability' freedom limits is what you can do with the code. For example, people are perpetually free to get that source but, you aren't free to incorporate it into proprietary software.

One entities freedoms can be a limit to another's freedoms.

[streptomycin]

I was just amused that someone praised for being so civil and respectful and mature would make a needlessly incendiary comment about the GPL on their website. Particularly as religious debates about open source licenses are quite stereotypical of disrespectful, immature, uncivilized nerds.

[bugsy]

I'm surprised that you are so open that you are disrespectful, immature, and uncivilized, but thanks.

[streptomycin]

Thanks for your posts, which very clearly validate my point that the original quoted statement was flamebait :)

[wmobit]

Saying the GPL is draconian and limits freedom is like saying the 13th amendment limits freedom since it takes away your right to own slaves.

[psykotic]

That rhetorical stance you take is particularly irksome when someone is talking about giving away their own code. He isn't whining that library X isn't under the GPL/LGPL. He's saying that'd he'd rather just give away his code entirely with no legal strings attached whatsoever.

[wmobit]

Such is impossible under current copyright law

[psykotic]

Could you be more precise? Are you repeating the "it's impossible to voluntarily place a work in the public domain" canard? There are well-established precedents in the US and Europe for authors waiving copyright. See djb's FAQ: http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html. If you are really paranoid and want a wordy license written in legalese to the same effect, you could use CC0. There's a detailed FAQ here: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ. There's also the Unlicense patterned on SQLite's public domain declaration: http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense.

In short, if you agree with the philosophical and practical advantages of releasing your code into the public domain, there is no excuse not do so under the guise of legal FUD.

[bugsy]

The 13th amendment establishes the right of the state to own slaves.

Technically, according to the text of the 13th amendment, it formally and legally establishes as a constitutional right of the state to declare people slaves as "punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", which has of course resulted in prison chain gangs and various corporations hiring prisoners for cheap compliant slave labor over the years, and in the demand for such slave labor and thus the motivation of the state to imprison as many people as possible.

[culturestate]

That you can point to that quote as the most inflammatory thing Notch has said just reinforces OP's point.

[streptomycin]

I have no idea if it's the most inflammatory thing he's said. I don't know much about him other than he wrote a video game I've never played. I just saw http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938141 reference "openness" and was wondering if Minecraft was actually open source, as I didn't think it was. So I googled for license info, and the first thing I found was a quote that wouldn't be out of place in any typical Linux nerd flamewar.

And then I saw the comment about Notch being so respectful and civil and whatnot, and I luled and posted the flame inducing quote.

Not surprisingly, flames ensued.

[ugh]

Wait what? How could a reasonable person possibly be offended by what you quoted? There is entirely too little context there and the sentence is worded very politely.

(L)GPL certainly is draconian (in the sense of strict) and all he is saying is that he personally is not very happy about that. How anyone could not see this as a reasonable statement boggles the mind. (I’m not saying that you have to agree with it.)

[mcantor]

Thanks for helpin' a brotha out!

[windsurfer]

Not only is this out of context, but the (L)GPL is very draconian. Not that that's a bad thing, it is by design.