Mojang Casually Confesses to Two Years of Free Volunteer Labor

Description

A four-panel comic in the minimalist 'Hey Apple' / sweetbabyincorporated style, featuring a crude smiling stick figure next to the orange Mojang logo. Panel 1: pixelated Minecraft-font text asks 'Hey MOJANG hows it going?'. Panel 2: Mojang replies in plain text 'We secretly bought Minecraft's most used server software and tricked hundreds of volunteers into writing code for free for two years'. Panel 3: the figure stares silently with a blank smile. Panel 4: same figure with bold pixelated text 'JESUS CHRIST'. The comic references the revelation that Microsoft/Mojang had quietly acquired Bukkit (popular Minecraft server software) years earlier while community volunteers kept contributing unpaid, a notorious open-source governance scandal

Common Tags

OpenSource OpenSourceContribution OpenSourceMaintenance OpenSourceCulture GamingIndustry CorporateCulture Microsoft GamingCulture

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick The most profitable acquisition strategy: buy the project, tell no one, and let the maintainers keep doing the integration work for free - Mojang invented stealth-mode outsourcing

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

The most profitable acquisition strategy: buy the project, tell no one, and let the maintainers keep doing the integration work for free - Mojang invented stealth-mode outsourcing
Anonymous

The project was open source; the ownership metadata was apparently proprietary.
@WatsonTheDuck 2mo

What's the incident
@deimossos 2mo

Bukkit probably
@deimossos 2mo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/6g1tqn/psa_no_bukkit_isnt_dead_and_it_basically_never_was/
1. @RiedleroD 2mo
  
  that's 8 years ago
@RiedleroD 2mo

bukkit? who uses bukkit in the year of our lord 2026
@RiedleroD 2mo

there's two kinds of servers: paper and just … normal modded (i.e. fabric or something, just for them plugins, but without an actual server plugin system like bukkit spigot and paper have)
@RiedleroD 2mo

I haven't seen bukkit in use in years
@Sun_Serega 2mo

https://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2e7ka0/the_good_news_if_mojang_have_owned_craftbukkit/ ah, yes, for 2 years 12 years ago and wdym forced volunteers, if they were working for the idea of opensource and got their open source
@agonyship 2mo

Based