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Why no Steam, Notch?

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Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#101

Post by DrStalker »

gamble wrote: post #61
georgemcbay wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but then I'm not sure why a less restricted Minecraft on Steam on the PC is a problem... I'd actually buy it then. I do very little PC gaming these days, 100% of it via titles bought on Steam -- people can argue about the DRM issues with it all day long, but the cloud features of it that allow me to access my game library from whichever of my computers I am currently logged into is huge as is the central…

Minecraft on 360 is never going to be more than a niche, given the type of game it is. If it's available through Steam, however, the majority of PC players will end up buying through Steam and that population will pressure the non-Steam PC players to move to Steam.

There's precedent for games purchased outside of Steam being available in steam, so there's no technical barrier to giving all existing Minecraft owners a copy of the Steam version.

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#102

Post by baby »

I personally added Minecraft in my steam's library so I can launch it from steam and people can see when I'm playing Minecraft. The only shortcoming is, if you are not on your main computer you have to download the game from minecraft.net and not steam. Is it really a huge hassle?

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#103

Post by 0x0x0x »

grey wrote: post #97
nkassis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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."

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

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#104

Post by fhars »

georgemcbay wrote: post #86
rmc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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,…

There is almost no country in the world where a work by an author that is alive or has died less than seventy years ago can be in the public domain. So releasing code as "public domain" more or less limits the release to the US.

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#105

Post by sliverstorm »

cookiecaper wrote: post #99
MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Bra…

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 r…

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.

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#106

Post by thristian »

georgemcbay wrote: post #30
dkersten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

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 fa…

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.

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#107

Post by thristian »

sukuriant wrote: post #42
seanalltogether wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the issue is not 'countries that don't recognise the public domain', but rather 'countries that do not allow authors to donate their works to the public domain', which includes the USA (since 1978):

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#108

Post by GeneralMaximus »

sliverstorm wrote: post #105
cookiecaper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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 fi…

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.

Re: Why no Steam, Notch?

#109

Post by unwind »

bryanh wrote: post #37

I can understand Notch's position here, because really, the only thing Steam can provide Majong with is... eyeballs and distribution? Some sort of community? I don't know, but I don't think Minecraft needs any help with those.

Nit-pick: it's "Mojang", not "Majong". The latter is almost a classical board game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong), the former is most probably the Swedish word "mojäng" but with our exotic dots removed for a change. "Mojäng", btw, means roughly "gizmo", or "contraption".
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