Top all-time · #8185
Justin Wheeler
Personal blog · blog.jwf.ioprogrammingculture
Justin Wheeler's personal blog at blog.jwf.io covers programming and culture. Since 2020, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its account of the Bukkit Minecraft server project, including Mojang's secret acquisition and the DMCA takedown. One commenter called one post a good recap of those events.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Homepage of Justin Wheeler, an Open Source contributor and Free Software advocate from Georgia, USA.
Most-linked posts?
- The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-10-06
What Hacker News says?
I'm reminded of the infamous Mojang/Microsoft fiasco with the Bukkit community. They gave no support to a project, after "secretly" acquiring it when they hired some of the developers, letting a volunteer work hard for years maintaining it. He was rightfully outraged when he discovered he had basically done years of free labor for Microsoft, and ended up leveraging a DMCA notice to shutter the project, due to the la…
Comment linking /2020/04/open-source-minecraft-bukkit-gpl/
on “Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism”Submitted The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe event that caused the DMCA was EvilSeph trying to shut down Bukkit, leading to Mojang saying “sike, we own it”. A good recap; https://blog.jwf.io/2020/04/open-source-minecraft-bukkit-gpl...
Comment linking /2020/04/open-source-minecraft-bukkit-gpl/?amp=1
on “PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server”Submitted The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL as a story · 3 points
HN discussionInterestingly enough, CB wasn't DMCAed by Mojang, but actually from one of its contributors, who was angry that he had been contributing free labor to a project that was secretly owned by Mojang (there was no CLA so he was legally able to take down the project by not authorizing his contributions to be used). There was a whole lot of drama and conflicting viewpoints around about this, but here's a post about it that…
Comment linking /2020/04/open-source-minecraft-bukkit-gpl/
on “PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server”Submitted On Free Software, Red Hat, and Iran as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of drama there. Basically, there was Bukkit. In 2011, Mojang hired a bunch of Bukkit's developers, but didn't tell anyone that they also legally took control of the Bukkit project. This was because Mojang didn't really want Bukkit to be their official API as much as being a temporary API for the time being (and also didn't want to have anyone assume they would be responsible for it), but from that poin…
Comment linking /2020/04/open-source-minecraft-bukkit-gpl/
on a deleted threadSubmitted The day open source died: a story about Minecraft, Bukkit, and the GPL as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The day open source died as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Metrics to measure sustainable open source investments as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted How did Free Software build a social movement as a story · 1 points
HN discussion