What comes to mind?

plankton@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 558 points –
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Audacity was the first one I thought of.

Or MultiMC, PolyMC, the Sodium mod, or the original Minecraft Forge.

(Minecraft community devs need to stop having drama lmao)

I love how well the PolyMC -> PrismLauncher transition went. It’s great that the asshole owning it didn’t just spew transphobic hate, but also removed the contribution rights to all other people, leading them to immediately flock to an alternative.

Wait, what happened to Audacity?

I believe they were bought by someone and eventually implemented some questionable practices. I don't remember the exact details, maybe someone else does.

I remember reading an update which said that the company went back on most (or all?) the negative changes and it's ok to use again.

I didn't confirm it myself, but that's part of why the alternatives aren't seeing as much development now

Wasnt it something about data collection?

It was, the company that bought out Audacity added a bunch of telemetry to it

Wait, what happened to Multi MC? I still use it whenever the want to play modded Minecraft returns

I actually had to look it up as I couldn't remember why I made the first switch. PolyMC was forked from MultiMC after they dropped third-party modpack support. Then there was some drama with one of the devs of PolyMC, spawning Prism Launcher

What happened to the Sodium mod?

The lead developer changed the license to a much less permissive one because of drama surrounding being credited in modpacks. The dev thinks there are forks that exist solely to sidestep crediting the original mod, I'm not up to date enough on Minecraft modding lore to know if this is true or not.

I'm pretty sure there's also a fork that branches off of the last GPL commit but I forget what it's called.

Doesn't GPL technically require you to attribute the upstream anyway?

The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.

Most open sorce licenses do, not just the GPL. I'm not sure what Minecraft modpackers do. But in the free and open source world, you'll always find that attribution. Sometimes they have a list who wrote the software and who maintained it for what timespan.

Modpacks still have attribution but they likely have attribution to the fork. The fork will have attribution in the source code somewhere but most MC players aren't likely to actually look at the GitHub repo, so they'll only see the fork's name.

Ah okay. I wouldn't know. I played Minetest instead of Minecraft. And the community there seems to be nice albeit a bit small. I learned a bit of Lua and contributed some smaller fixes to some mods. But I guess the gaming and modding community for propriety games is a bit different than the open source community.

what happened with the original Minecraft Forge?

The dev who owned the branding for forge (LexManos) is infamously abrasive and rude to others to the point where the forge community was slowly falling apart because new people didn't want to be involved with him. The rest of the team decided to rebrand to NeoForge and continue without him.

Lol, I mean it's better to have a brief period of drama than permanently put up with the bad management. Although Sodium is an exception to that, I think the people working on it are the right people.

I'm conflicted on the license change, though. I don't know if it makes sense or not.

That's definitely true but at the same time why do people have to cause fights in the first place, they're all part of a community for a game they enjoy playing :(

I also agree with you on the sodium license change, it's definitely the most reasonable of the ones I listed since the dev seemed to be getting maintainer burn-out and had some bad experiences with other people in the MC modding community. I don't really like the idea of it not being OSS though because the key strength of that is not being tied to a single maintainer or group.