On HN, a place probably filled with technical guys, people are generaly putting themselves in dev shoes. They are accusing the author of feeling entitled to more money because he felt like he was part of the team and that he think his work is equaly important as the work of everyone else. Devs being devs generaly know that coding is hard and long, and generaly don't know if writing a poem is difficult or not.
On the subreddit, a place probably filled with long time minecraft player, people are putting themselves in the artist shoes. They support the author and are thanking him for creating one of the key moment during a minecraft game : the end.
Rationality versus Emotion. Who is right, who is wrong ? Is anyone right ? Maybe both side are blinded by their beliefs ?
I'm reminded of a similar event with the Doom soundtrack https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...
But Mick's case is very different. Mojang did pay, the guy did write, it's just that the guy wanted more than there was there in the informal agreement.
Mick Gordon did sign, idSoftware did not follow the contract, failed to pay on multiple occasions and did not even try to come back to reason in the longer term. Then there's the whole OST story, which is a different kind of evil. Marty Stratton, the producer of the game, played a very dirty game with Gordon with all of the blame shifting and payment problems and that horrible, horrible original reddit post.
At least that's my reading of it after first hearing about this issue at all. Maybe there's another side to the story.
It sounds like Mojang threw £20k at the author without understanding or articulating what that payment entitled them to.
At a later point they realised they didn't own the actual work itself and tried to strong-arm the author into giving them that ownership for effectively nothing.
At the time Mojang appears to believe that this could be an issue during due diligence. With the amount of money on the table, even offering a life changing sum to the author would have had a nearly imperceptible affect on the overall balance of the acquisition.
That doesn't make any sense. When you treat people with "emotions" ... this is the issue. Emotions are unclear, confusing and are different for everyone. Treating people based on emotions and feelings just results in inequality and confusion for everyone. This the perfect example where if treated it as a rational and business transaction, he would have come out on top. It's his emotions, and the fact that he created some sort of friendship for which he accepted "less" money is his fault. If he treated the issue rationally and sent it to this agent, he would be far happier today.
this reasoning carries an implicit assumption (or axiom[1]): "money can buy happiness"
in fact, the argues in the story, that they would probably not have as good as a relationship with their first child if they'd had gotten a lot of money back when all this went down...
[1] what is an axiom? I haven't quite figured it out, but an axiom should never be implicit. so maybe not a good simile[2].
[2] the fuck's a simile? analogy? metaphor? ugh.
I’ve found this to be very effective in avoiding writers who want to be thought of as artists.
In this particular case I see the value of both sides. I sympathize with the writer and think he did a good thing releasing his work into the public domain, yet I also agree with comments that his contract was more reasonable than he makes it out to be.
I think people (and tech people especially, but also many entrepreneurs) like to misuse "rationality vs emotion" as a false dichotomy because it allows framing yourself as "rational" and therefore "correct" and the other side as "emotional" and therefore "flawed". In reality no human being is truly rational and by contrasting ourselves with "emotional" people we just end up mistaking callousness or cynicism for rationality.
Yes, it's unreasonable to expect a corporation to consider "emotional" factors and the author acknowledges this when talking about Microsoft, but when talking about early Mojang that's not Mojang, that's Notch personally. Arguably there may have been different understandings of the relationship but it's perfectly reasonable (or "rational"?) to expect human-to-human interactions to follow different rules than business-to-business ones involving a corporation.
Everyone involved in making Minecraft happen contributed to its success, not just the core team and him as an external one-off contributor but literally even the office cleaning staff and the retail workers of the shops those people frequented and so on. It's practically fractal in that if you pick any arbitrarily distant point and consider how things would have worked out if you cut off and isolate everything on either side of it, Minecraft couldn't have happened or at least not as successfully as it did.
But this complexity is too overwhelming when you need to put a dollar amount to every contribution so it's natural to make the cut-off happen much closer and a natural fault line is employees vs external contributors or continuous contributors vs one-time contributors. But that isn't rationality. That's just the limitations of the economic system based around the exchange and control of money as capital.
For anyone buying one of the posters, t-shirts, totes, etc. with the text of the poem or a part of it, it means a lot.
“May the force be with you” could have been anything else, and Star Wars wouldn’t be anything less than it is… yet, it’s an invaluable bit of writing!
