I've seen lots of work on alternate Minecraft servers; has anyone worked on an open Minecraft client (obviously not named "Minecraft" for trademark reasons, but compatible with the network protocol)?
Spout is working on a client as well as an open server, both are designed to be general purpose for voxel based games but have minecraft compatibility plugins: https://github.com/SpoutDev/Spout
That's one of the reasons I don't like Notch. This game is literally perfect for WebGL. The rendering done is minimal, the CPU work done is minimal, the textures are (or could be) tiny, and the code required would be tiny.
You don't like notch, who is one of the nicest and modest people in the world, because of a programming decision he made on his game and his product? You may disagree with a business decision, but saying you dislike someone personally because of it is a bit much.
Possibly because that's what Notch was comfortable with, it's a valid choice, and he built it and made big stacks of money instead of agonizing about what language to use on the grounds of whether people would think he was cool.
There are a couple projects in this direction (I looked into trying to make a bot at one point). Unfortunately, any names have slipped my memory at this point. But be assured, they exist.
