TrueCraft bans developer who have read reversed MineCraft code from development

5 points by argklm 11 years ago | 4 comments

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft

"If you want to keep up with development or contribute, join #truecraft on irc.esper.net. Pull requests will be rejected from authors who have read any decompiled official Minecraft code.

To get started, sign the Contributor License Agreement to establish that you have not, in fact, ever read decompiled Minecraft code.

If you have read the Minecraft source, you can contribute to the TrueCraft wiki here. Under no circumstances should you expose clean devs to source code."

It seems like a draconian measure considering that a big part of people interested in TrueCraft development, could be programmers interested enough in MineCraft to have seen the code. I think that early modders were forced to reverse MineCraft in order to get the code to work. What do you think?

necavi 11 years ago |

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

They're taking a route that is intended to prevent legal challenges in the future. It makes quite a bit of sense.

kwhitefoot 11 years ago |

Hardly draconian. Since Truecraft describes itself as a clean room implementation it would be hypocritical to accept contributions from people who have read the code.

staunch 11 years ago |

The alternative is they risk Microsoft coming after them for stealing the intellectual property they just paid billions for.

anon3_ 11 years ago | |

Businesses aren't just buying into IP - they're buying into a brand, onboarding their engineers, absorbing the userbase.

On the flip side, maybe MS will be excited and flattered to see it's in C#. Maybe MS will take this as a new Minecraft codebase. If you're MS, why bother with java? How does an open source MC hurt? The bukkit community seems to be active :) [1]

https://bukkit.org/