The Next Best Thing to Open Source?

According to Notch, Minecraft is moving to an Android-like model for its mods development. You will be able to sign up for free, accept a license, and get access to the complete source code via SVN (one can tell these aren't F/OSS people... SVN, seriously?) to develop mods.

After some internal discussion and general anxiety, we’ve arrived at a plan for supporting mods. It’s still a bit vague and the details might change after we’ve run it by our lawyers, but here’s what we want to do:

• Let players sign up as “mod developers”. This will cost money (edit: no longer costs money!), and will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per mod team).
• Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository. As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.
• Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers have access to this certificate.

The rules of the license deal will contain:

• Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
• You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us
• The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
• We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community.

Arguably, this is only one step away from properly open sourcing the game. I hope Minecraft will take that step one of these days, it undoubtedly has made Mojang millions already.