Select snips:
> I just misunderstood what was going on.
> Now, Carl didn’t do anything wrong here. Carl is not the baddie either. He was a CEO, and major shareholder, behaving the way a CEO and major shareholder is supposed to behave. The misunderstanding was all mine.
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
> Again, I have to calm down and remind myself, and you, there are no bad guys in this story. Do not hassle Markus, or Carl (or even Microsoft) about this. I’m sure they didn’t even think of it as “tricking” me; that’s my perspective, not theirs.
> He was projecting his motivations onto me, in the same way I had been projecting my motivations onto him. Mutual misunderstanding.
> Most of the fault there is mine (I am a deeply flawed guy)
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
But the reality is that _all_ of the misunderstanding comes from him. There is no "mutual misunderstanding", Mojang understood the conversation perfectly well.
The author asked for an offer, Mojang offered $20k, and the author accepted. It's not reasonable to expect Mojang to "understand" the author is going to hold some grudge about believing they deserve more than the offer they accepted without negotiation.
The correct response from the author would be something along the lines of "I am entirely at fault, all of the misunderstanding was on my side, Mojang/Notch/Carl did nothing wrong".
Instead the author reminds us at every turn about how Notch gave bonuses to all the Mojang employees but not him, how they're such a great guy for not getting lawyers involved, and how they're turning their work into a "priceless gift" (despite being paid $20000 for it).
But at the same time it's pretty clear he was jealous of all the money he didn't want to talk about, and that he saw himself as a partner rather than a contractor.
It is what it is, everyone involved probably learned some form of lesson, and I don't see why we need to create villains or victims in this story.
More fundamentally, it takes two to tango. Just because the perspective of Mojang is the more common one in the industry doesn't make it the more "correct" interpretation. It's very much a two-way street and it's on both parties to make sure they understand each other when things are not explicitly spelled out and agreed upon.
I mean, ignore all the stuff about friends, blah blah, Carl has apparently signed them up for whatever the defaults are under (based on other comments) UK IP laws?
”The misunderstanding was all mine.”
> We just didn’t understand each other, because we were playing different language games.
The author collectively places the blame on poor communication from both sides. But the reality is that all of the poor communication was entirely from his side, and he knew in advance he struggled talking about money and had an agent for that very purpose.
There's also this whole weird subsection where he describes things the universe did to him as if he has no agency in his own actions and where he ended up in life.
