[hnbad]

HN is also filled with more entrepreneurial guys, so viewing this purely as a financial transaction makes sense from that point of view. HN is the sidecar to a venture capital accelator, not a tech company like, say, JetBrains.

I think people (and tech people especially, but also many entrepreneurs) like to misuse "rationality vs emotion" as a false dichotomy because it allows framing yourself as "rational" and therefore "correct" and the other side as "emotional" and therefore "flawed". In reality no human being is truly rational and by contrasting ourselves with "emotional" people we just end up mistaking callousness or cynicism for rationality.

Yes, it's unreasonable to expect a corporation to consider "emotional" factors and the author acknowledges this when talking about Microsoft, but when talking about early Mojang that's not Mojang, that's Notch personally. Arguably there may have been different understandings of the relationship but it's perfectly reasonable (or "rational"?) to expect human-to-human interactions to follow different rules than business-to-business ones involving a corporation.

Everyone involved in making Minecraft happen contributed to its success, not just the core team and him as an external one-off contributor but literally even the office cleaning staff and the retail workers of the shops those people frequented and so on. It's practically fractal in that if you pick any arbitrarily distant point and consider how things would have worked out if you cut off and isolate everything on either side of it, Minecraft couldn't have happened or at least not as successfully as it did.

But this complexity is too overwhelming when you need to put a dollar amount to every contribution so it's natural to make the cut-off happen much closer and a natural fault line is employees vs external contributors or continuous contributors vs one-time contributors. But that isn't rationality. That's just the limitations of the economic system based around the exchange and control of money as capital.