Hot take: I'm tempted to say that minecraft is "practically" even if not legally open source. It's very well-understood internally and has been _heavily_ colonized by mod developers.
It's at the point where it's impossible to run a safe and secure minecraft server without installing a mod like paper that completely overhauls the game. There are several modpacks that contain probably 50x more code in mods than code from mojang.
Not to mention, who really controls the game?
If microsoft ever did anything truly egregious I have no doubt that the entire community would pick up sticks and move. It would be large, it would be coordinated, and it would be swift. There are LOTS of successful mincraft clone projects out there, ranging from being loosely minecraft-inspired with lots of new content, to striving to replicate each new feature and addition perfectly, to being written in rust, you name it. The loss of java mods would suck, but give it a year or two and most of the active ones would probably be rewritten. Hell, most of them are written against the very handy Forge modding API, not microsoft's code.
Never mind the fact that the moment microsoft tries to crack down on modding, the various open-source 3rd party launchers will patch out the licence-mandated piracy checks (or will be forked to do so, in fact these pirate forks probably already exist).
It's at the point where it's impossible to run a safe and secure minecraft server without installing a mod like paper that completely overhauls the game. There are several modpacks that contain probably 50x more code in mods than code from mojang.
Not to mention, who really controls the game?
If microsoft ever did anything truly egregious I have no doubt that the entire community would pick up sticks and move. It would be large, it would be coordinated, and it would be swift. There are LOTS of successful mincraft clone projects out there, ranging from being loosely minecraft-inspired with lots of new content, to striving to replicate each new feature and addition perfectly, to being written in rust, you name it. The loss of java mods would suck, but give it a year or two and most of the active ones would probably be rewritten. Hell, most of them are written against the very handy Forge modding API, not microsoft's code.
Never mind the fact that the moment microsoft tries to crack down on modding, the various open-source 3rd party launchers will patch out the licence-mandated piracy checks (or will be forked to do so, in fact these pirate forks probably already exist).