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> hugest blow open source received in recent times was Minecraft being bought by Microsoft Minecraft is and always was entirely proprietary and closed. People

by serge2k 10y ago

> hugest blow open source received in recent times was Minecraft being bought by Microsoft Minecraft is and always was entirely proprietary and closed. People reverse engineered java bytecode to get what they wanted, but that doesn't make it any less proprietary.

Pica_soO 10y ago
Yes, but the whole community that spawned around it- is a open source community by mentality. People today dont have to setup a OS to get a computer going, they dont have to learn anything, thus many of them never get to know creation, and the joy it brings. Minecraft reintroduced that - lego is programmable matter, and minecraft was programmable matter, and most servers where/are anarchic. Its true it was proprietary, and it should have been wrestled with a real and better open source alternative from that fate. Whoever at microsoft saw this danger growing, and voted for hugging it to death, i draw my hat.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  I really think you are overthinking this. Minecraft is a fun game. Legos are fun toys. I don't think either was going to respawn a mass love of computer programming that probably never existed to begin with. People who want to create have always had outlets to do so. I would argue with the introduction of robot toys, raspberry pis and arduinos, that creation has never been more immediate than it currently is.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Im part of a open source game community (yes, the can even hold hostile and weird people), and we botched that- our tools got better and better - aka more powerful, and our new dev-base dwindled and declined until it is by now consisting only of devs dropping by from other projects. Even the map-editor, which used to just take bitmaps, is now in need of several complicated picture formats and a complex configuration file,and requires some knowledge about comp-science to get going. Others have worked against this trend- there are some neat tools in the making, but the community is not really behind pushing for easy access. You are right, im over-interpreting that there was a microsoft plan for this. But the perfection of minecraft at open source, that holds true. It was the perfect mixture- easy to get into,hard to get out, instant showable result, a lot of inspiring achievements, which you could investigate yourself and find out how they where made. Depending on the scope-infinite time spend digging on your "repo". It would have been a generation, for which openness was as natural as the openness of air and water, if the github of builds would have become real. But correlation is not causality. Lets say in two years time, on some bigger repo, a survey - did you play minecraft before you did start to code. Just to be certain.

by serge2k 10y ago

Pica_soO 10y ago

Yes, but the whole community that spawned around it- is a open source community by mentality. People today dont have to setup a OS to get a computer going, they dont have to learn anything, thus many of them never get to know creation, and the joy it brings. Minecraft reintroduced that - lego is programmable matter, and minecraft was programmable matter, and most servers where/are anarchic. Its true it was proprietary, and it should have been wrestled with a real and better open source alternative from that fate. Whoever at microsoft saw this danger growing, and voted for hugging it to death, i draw my hat.

stinkytaco 10y ago
I really think you are overthinking this. Minecraft is a fun game. Legos are fun toys. I don't think either was going to respawn a mass love of computer programming that probably never existed to begin with. People who want to create have always had outlets to do so. I would argue with the introduction of robot toys, raspberry pis and arduinos, that creation has never been more immediate than it currently is.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Im part of a open source game community (yes, the can even hold hostile and weird people), and we botched that- our tools got better and better - aka more powerful, and our new dev-base dwindled and declined until it is by now consisting only of devs dropping by from other projects. Even the map-editor, which used to just take bitmaps, is now in need of several complicated picture formats and a complex configuration file,and requires some knowledge about comp-science to get going. Others have worked against this trend- there are some neat tools in the making, but the community is not really behind pushing for easy access. You are right, im over-interpreting that there was a microsoft plan for this. But the perfection of minecraft at open source, that holds true. It was the perfect mixture- easy to get into,hard to get out, instant showable result, a lot of inspiring achievements, which you could investigate yourself and find out how they where made. Depending on the scope-infinite time spend digging on your "repo". It would have been a generation, for which openness was as natural as the openness of air and water, if the github of builds would have become real. But correlation is not causality. Lets say in two years time, on some bigger repo, a survey - did you play minecraft before you did start to code. Just to be certain.