I think it's still "All rights reserved". The rules for Ludum Dare say that you have to submit the code for judging, but you don't give up copyright. And he didn't put any license in the source archive. Although I doubt he'll complain, this porting effort might violate his copyright.
Last I heard at least, he still seem to regard mods to Minecraft as some bad terrible thing (though apparently Jeb has at least gotten him to go along with a mod framework--which is a good thing, because it's the only way Minecraft remains playable!), so "I doubt he'll complain" might be reaching a bit.
My impression was that Notch is fine with mods, but he just doesn't think there's a way to make Minecraft very moddable without effectively open-sourcing it, which he doesn't want to do.
Actually, isn't he still in Sweden? In that case, I have no idea if computer software is automatically copyrighted the moment it's written. I think maybe that's a US-only thing?
Sweden signed the Berne Convention [1] in 1904 [2], and has automatic copyright since at least then
They also signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty [3] in 2002, which expclitly says that computer programs are to be treated as literary works, and receive the same protection (that has been implemented by the DMCA in the US).
According to Directive 2006/116/EC [4] the copyright term in the EU for literary works up to 70 years after the author died.
If life expectancy continues to increase, they will probably extend the term again to cover the intended 2 generations.
Have fun playing your copy on vintage hardware then :)
I've been working on an Android game that I envision as a mashup of Zelda and Minecraft, so it's pretty entertaining to see Notch whip out a pretty similar idea over a single weekend.
Entertaining or frustrating?
The guy is a machine, I watched his stream (not the whole thing but a few minutes here and there) and he was almost never not typing (or editing something in paint.net).
How he maintains his focus for that long and doesn't get stumped by bugs for any great length of time is truly impressive.
The flip side to this is that his projects tend to accrete bad design decisions and just outright bugs that a more methodical developer wouldn't. Minecraft multiplayer comes to mind.
I'd imagine the pressure of having hundreds of people watching would keep him in check. It's pretty unlikely he'd stream himself doing some casual browsing with a sandwich in hand.
That happened to me as well (also not a programmer). It is because the directory with the sounds and images, called 'res', is not in the right place. You need to move the 'res' folder into the 'bin' folder.
I don't know how to configure eclipse to build this, but I spent a few minutes and made an ant script. Save [it](https://gist.github.com/1dd9bd89748f489f67c9) as `build.xml` in root directory of the project and run `$ ant jar`. This will produce `minicraft.jar` which you can execute by running `$ java -jar minicraft.jar`.
(Details: The reason eclipse is complaining is because the images weren't included as resources in the classpath. This cause a null pointer exception when the game attempts to load it's sprites. I don't really use eclipse, so I'm not sure how to fix it)
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] threadThey also signed the WIPO Copyright Treaty [3] in 2002, which expclitly says that computer programs are to be treated as literary works, and receive the same protection (that has been implemented by the DMCA in the US).
According to Directive 2006/116/EC [4] the copyright term in the EU for literary works up to 70 years after the author died. If life expectancy continues to increase, they will probably extend the term again to cover the intended 2 generations.
Have fun playing your copy on vintage hardware then :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Prote... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty [4]: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...:
https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/149273594667606017
Interpret that as you wish, but make no assumptions.
Though I made the dreadful mistake of watching it with comments on: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/12/20/troll-at-notch/
How he maintains his focus for that long and doesn't get stumped by bugs for any great length of time is truly impressive.
And it's a real treat to see a 2D game like it being made. Not to say other participants didn't have cool looking 2d games.
(Details: The reason eclipse is complaining is because the images weren't included as resources in the classpath. This cause a null pointer exception when the game attempts to load it's sprites. I don't really use eclipse, so I'm not sure how to fix it)
Link on github: http://github.com/chrislott/