For the first part of the article, I agree wholeheartedly and I have been very vocal for years on how it should be illegal for the worlds governments to pay millions of tax money to a foreign corporation just to maintain the internal system of government. At this point, Microsoft is essentially a global tax and it needs to end. That’s not how anything else works, but somehow microsoft windows and all it’s proprietary software gets a pass. I’m glad Germany is making a second experiment to shift their government operations to linux, and this time, microsoft will hopefully not be allowed to sabotage the experiment.

As for the latter part of the article. As a concept, Minetest is pure awesome. It does everything it should do, enabling an engine to be built upon by the community. The failure of Minetest however is the lack of a stable mod developer community. Since Minetest only provides an engine and has left the gemeplay up to the modding community, it will never “work”. What I mean is, to date, no mod has stayed alive long enough to be relevant, actively played, and to become a fully featured game. You can’t build a successful community, a stream show, a youtube channel, a blog, a clan, anything - around a mod that may just stop being developed randomly by the whim of the author; which means exposure, fans, playerbase, and enthusiasm can never grow. There is near zero potential for “marketing” to bring Minetest forward into popularity and relevance among the gaming community because of this, which is the ingredient necessary for the game to be played, explored, and grow. If Minetest is ever to succeed, the dev team need to make and maintain their own core mod of gameplay that will consistently stay relevant for the community to enjoy; aka. stability. and unfortunately this goes against their mission, which is why Minetest will likely never mature into its own.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Minetest and any exposition it gets. It’s one awesome project. But they really need to ensure stability through a core game mod, if they want to grow it to its real potential. No third party modder can give them that.

deleted by creator

Fully agree. And Minetest’s educational community is even more alive than back then. In Baden-Wuerttemberg (south-east Germany), teachers can get their own Minetest-based learning/teaching environment: https://blockalot.de/teilnahmebedingungen . Would be interesting to see whether there are more geographical areas where Minetest makes it’s way into schools.

Lovely article. I’d not heard of Minetest before, but it looks quite fun!