Comment Re: What the heck? (Score 4, Interesting) 354
The Minecraft modders are using some of the Minecraft code (as a result of decompilation and related techniques).
If the source code in question has been obtained by decompilation, is it really the "original" Minecraft source code (the one that is covered by the original license) ? I mean, you're basically looking at a non human-readable binary, freely distributed, and deducing a source code that would produce the same binary. At this point the resulting source code is your work IMHO.
Then again, things may seem a little different here since it's Java and I think using "decompilation" on the byte code produces code that is likely to be extremely close to the original. But it doesn't really seem that different.
At any rate, this specific case seems a lot more straightforward since if I understand correctly the bukkit guys sold their project without getting permission from all their contributors - the fact that the bukkit people used decompiled Java bytecode appears to have little relevance to the case itself.