Why no Steam, Notch?(notch.tumblr.com) |
Why no Steam, Notch?(notch.tumblr.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
> I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL
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.
Notch: Steam is too closed for Minecraft [2]
Minecraft is coming to Xbox 360 [3]
Head Asplode!
[1] http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/25/valve-ms-needs-to-be-comfort...
[2] http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch
[3] http://www.ifc.com/news/2011/06/e3-2011-minecraft-kinect-xbo...
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 centralized updating, etc. I realize I'm hardly representative of the entire PC gaming world (since I'm barely a PC gamer anymore), but if it isn't on Steam it doesn't really exist for me and I'd love to pay for and play a slightly dumbed down Minecraft.. looks like I'll have to do that on the 360 instead of on the PC.
Beats the shit out of dogma.
Good on ya, Notch.
To clarify my original comment, I was referring to the open playground approach of Minecraft, but making an unfounded assumption that the open playground model extended to the code. I made that assumption because of second-hand knowledge that mods were making it into the game. Mea culpa.
I know many people on HN are rooting for walled gardens to fail (App Store) and for openness to triumph. Do these same people willingly use Steam and think it's great? Isn't Steam's delivery platform for games and the App Store's delivery platform for iOS apps pretty much the same concept? If someone is against the App Store on principle, shouldn't they also be against Steam and not use it?
I'm actually quite surprised that Valve has -any- say in what they do on their own website, or what they implement in the game. I could understand having to implement certain features (like not crashing with the Steam overlay) but to prevent features, marketing, non-game sales, or anything else that doesn't directly affect Valve?
Inconceivable.
Apple and XBLA have similar restrictions about interaction outside of their walled gardens. There are good reasons for this: Preventing fraud (they trust their credit card processing much more than some random app developer), filtering objectionable content for those under 18, ensuring a certain minimum standard of quality, etc.
Also sorry, I accidentally downvoted you when I meant to upvote you. (Can someone please move those arrows farther apart?)
It's still the first time I've seen anyone say that physical goods based on the game were a problem. I really can't quite believe that.
In-game stuff, yeah, I can see it. Ratings and whatnot. But I don't think Mojang/Notch would have a problem on the ratings end of things, unless the ratings board was out of control. Still, I could see him not taking the chance.
Steam sell a couple of hundreds indie games (out of many thousands currently on the market) throughout the year.
I think the HIB is by design not a service that the average indie (or even the exceptionally good indie) can get on.
As a developer and a player, that's what I want. A package manager with a payment system and a store front, basically. You can add achievements and friend lists and the rest later.
I don't like DLC's either, but I guess I just don't like any games enough to care. What I'm trying to say is that I'd like minecraft to stay in it's current innocent state. Perhaps if it grows like World of Warcraft did it will make sense, but it's a tough sell for me now. The simplicity is what makes it so charming.
Apparently you are unaware of the runaway success of the Mann Co Store in TF2, which has done so well that TF2 is now Free-to-Play. Hats are among the variety of items that are sold on the Mann Co Store.
You... have never heard of Team Fortress 2 have you?
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann_Co._Store#Headgear
For the last few years, TF2 has been called "a war-themed hat simulator".
There isn't much of a wall around the Steam garden.
Walled Garden != Monopoly
*I'm fully aware that there are a lot of people who say that yes, they want it to be open, but I'd be curious in seeing how much zealous anti-app-store sentiment there would be if Apple was more consistent with their policies and verbose about why one app or another was rejected.
I have yet to hear a story about a game being
booted from Steam.
Now let's say I have a Windows or Mac PC and I'd like to install a non-Steam game on it. What is the barrier to doing so? Pretty much zero, since there are a ton of other digital and retail options. Steam isn't the only way of downloading PC games, so there's plenty you can do about it.
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.
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.
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.
Garry's mod is probably he most popular success story of a game made by a user of Steam that saw enough success that steam came to him with a mutually beneficial plan, and he went for it. Now I don't have the full details of the GM9 acquisition, but from the way he told the story when it happened, he was exceptionally pleased and satisfied with the way it turned out.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
Edit: Source
>Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp
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.
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.
But I'm not really vocal about that. If someone finds the source: great for them. If not great for my wallet ;)
specifically "once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source."
I kid, I kid...
So from a subjective point of view, I would agree that it is a stupid point of view. And I actually think that a poll of gamers, not just TF2 players, would give you the same answer.
However from a business point of view, certainly not a stupid view, since (as you said) it does actually work.
Depends what you're trying to judge, the concept for gamers or the concept as a business plan.
I have never had a problem where a number of people on a server are trading (except on dedicated trading servers).
http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp
The client is self-updating.
Last week, though--last week, they learned! They left one guy behind to deal with any problems that occurred. Of course, that one guy, whose entire capability to fix problems was "bounce the server", spent seven hours in a pub getting plastered while their authentication server was down again. True to form, they treated it as "lulz" instead of taking some responsibility for the screw-up.
So I can't blame people for wanting to stick to Steam. They at least have those "IT people" for fixing problems.
I agree that it is embarrassing for a company demoing at a conference to have a protracted outage on their website, but the impact on current users should have been nil.
Have they made the DRM stickier since I last played?
Using the loaded term monopoly feels like an attempt to use emotional persuasion rather than debate on the merits. Which is a shame because I think the walled garden deserves some good criticism in a lot of ways.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
</nitpicking>
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...
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.