Literally worse than EA

* Minecraft is pretty expensive to host. The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting. Only a few servers make enough to cover wages. Most just barely scrape by. DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly.

* Most Minecraft servers are no longer vanilla Minecraft servers. The Minecraft server software is pretty bad in both functionality and performance. Most servers use Craftbukkit or Spigot, which has a plugin API (Spigot is a patched version of Craftbukkit with mostly performance fixes). Craftbukkit is open source, but is a legally gray area as it contains the decompiled code from the Mojang server. There is an API for writing plugins called Bukkit which is totally separate from the craftbukkit server implementation.

* The large servers have tried to work with Mojang to get a set of rules they can work with. Mojang listened to them and actually added clauses prohibiting some of the things they said they needed to even have a chance of this working for them.

* While Mojang claim their EULA never allowed servers to make money, their first one actually did. They've also granted written permission to some servers. Last year they had a panel at Minecon were top server owners actually talked about how their server makes money. Despite what their EULA says, Mojang has been basically telling servers it was fine to monetize up until now.

* Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought.

* Bungeecord is a proxy system that allows players to switch between multiple servers without logging out. The Minecraft clients multiplayer server list support has barely improved since Alpha. Mojang's new EULA treats a bungeecord proxy as a single server. This means that although they allow owners to charge players to access a server, it's pretty much impossible to do without inconveniencing players.

* The Minecraft network protocol is not patented. A number of open source server implementations exist which do no use any Mojang code. Since these changes have been announced these projects have become much more active with disgruntled developers starting to contribute. It is believed that the EULA cannot legally be enforced on these servers, although one Mojang developer made a statement to the contrary.

* No final draft for the new EULA has actually be made available, but a date for compliance has already been set. 1st August 2014.

* Mojang released their Realms hosting service worldwide just before making these changes, prompting many to accuse them of trying to eliminate the competition. However, they could simply stop releasing their server software if that was their intention, so most people don't believe this to be true.

Mods are created using the decompiled client, and built against that. But when they are released, they do not contain any of Mojang's code.

Installing mods is done by copying compiled .class files into the client .jar

    * Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought.

What's pretty clear in all this is that Notch does not want Minecraft to become some kind of pay-to-win game (which would inevitably damage the reputation of the game). I think he is absolutely right to stand by this. He also has stated numerous times on Twitter that Mojang doesn't care about server admins getting money for the service (if anything to pay for the hosting costs), as long as any gameplay modification that is distributed is available for all players without paying.

Again, this is the misconception that game developers can only ever do one thing at a time. True for one or two person developers, not true for Mojang. They can afford lawyers. Developers will have nothing to do with the implementation of this policy. They are working on the modding API, just as before.

Also, this was triggered from the outside. Someone asked for clarification on the policy, Mojang looked over all the feedback and came back with this response. It’s purely reactive, not an initiative.

You are talking nonsense. Plausible sounding nonsense, but still nonsense.