I mean for what it's worth sales never really died out.

well to be fair Microsoft gave him almost 2 billion for it, at which point it wasn't his to open source anymore, and for him being a sellout I don't blame him, I blame his obnoxious fanbase at the time.

Oh of course, but there was a long period before the sale during which it could have happened.

When did "sales start dying"?

Never.

> Microsoft followed through where Notch couldn't.

But this isn't the full source code.

It's more than Notch ever released? And it's my understanding there's more to follow.

The entire source of Minecraft has been available to mod authors for quite some time.

That's like saying everything is open source if you can write assembly. Minecraft only ever released binaries and they also went out of their way to use an obfuscator so all of the class and method names are garbage and change every update.

They also released a modders kit which renamed all the classes and methods, producing source code which, when compiled again, produced Minecraft.

The Mod Coder Pack wasn't developed by Mojang. MCP is the work of the community to reverse engineer and deobfuscate Mojang's binaries. The whole point of creating the MCP in the first place was to get around Mojang's use of tools to break most Java decompilers and try and document and come up with sensible names for all of the classes.

If Mojang had simply compiled and released their game without obfuscating it first then there would be no point to the MCP in the first place.

The person who created the MCP was hired by Mojang several years ago.

That person still releases the MCP with Mojang's blessing last I checked.

That doesn't change the fact that Mojang didn't make MCP. If Searge didn't step up and do it there's no reason to believe that Mojang ever would have come up with something similar. Mojang promised for years and years that "the modding API will be released any time now" yet they haven't done anything to materially support the modding community other than to hire Searge and the Bukkit team.

I guess they finally have behavior packs like resource packs for Bedrock edition (used to be Minecraft PE) but that doesn't allow you to write any kind of turing complete code for custom behaviors. That's the closest they've come and all that lets you do is stuff like make pigs behave like a creeper and explode when the player gets too close.

To date it has been 8 YEARS literally the better part of a decade from when Mojang first announced that they were going to release a modding API and they still haven't done anything. Releasing these two libraries as open source is a nice gesture but that doesn't actually do anything for the modding community. The least they could do is just stop obfuscating their releases so that MCP isn't stuck doing a bunch of unnecessary work.

decompiling is not the same as releasing the source with a license.

It didn't just decompile. It renamed all classes and methods and it included a source code usage license.

Maybe his hands were tied in the sense that releasing things open source would limit his ability to package and sell it off at a later date? I'm sure there were negotiations in progress at the time he would have considered doing so and from my POV, which could be terribly wrong, it would seem that releasing the thing you are considering to sell, for free, would sort of meddle with the entire process of selling it off?